Fools, Drunks, and the United States

It is necessary to begin by noting the fraudulence, even the criminality, of the analysis that follows. I will explain at the end.

That said, something remarkable began to happen after the first presidential debate last Tuesday. Democratic common sense began to reassert itself. Whether it will hold through the election is another question.

The last turning point of this sort came after the revelation in the spring of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. At that time, democratic decency -- cousin to democratic common sense -- reasserted itself. The Bush administration and its allies in Congress and the right-wing media at first responded as they had done to every other criticism of their conduct of the war: by minimizing their wrongdoings and attacking their critics as enemy apologists. If they had succeeded, the country would have moved toward brutality and lawlessness.

Instead, the center held. Most Americans thought the behavior of U.S. troops and civilians toward Iraqi prisoners reprehensible. So did less partisan conservatives, such as Senator John McCain, a longtime prisoner of war in Hanoi, Vietnam. In the end, the Bush administration had to express abject regret for abuses it would have preferred to ignore.

What made Abu Ghraib different? Partly, it was the images, the irrefutable evidence of intimate violence. Partly, though, it was a rejection of a central contention of the Bush administration: that after September 11, war prevails everywhere and at all times and justifies anything. This has at times been the official legal position of the administration. It has never stopped being the rhetorical position of a leader who relentlessly refers to himself as "a war president," and who likes to insist that "the world changed" on September 11.

Americans will accept pretty much any extreme in war. There has never been much move to repent the bombing of Hiroshima, the fire-bombing of Tokyo or Dresden, or atrocities in Vietnam -- which John Kerry is still routinely denounced for having acknowledged as a young and disaffected veteran. But in the response to Abu Ghraib, a majority refused to accept that the merciless logic of war applies to helpless prisoners. Instead of combat, they saw sadism, and recoiled. The Bush administration, trying to excuse torture under the general exoneration of war, was caught when its support fell out from beneath it.

In the first debate, too, the central fact seems to have been the power of images: President Bush's scowls, smirks, and irregular gestures have been his political stock-in-trade, physical expressions of his disdain for his opponent; but somehow that night they failed. To many viewers he looked small, juvenile, uncomfortable. What had been a sign of authenticity became overnight a sign of immaturity, even weakness.

As with the overreach of the "war" excuse, the president's mistake was playing a strong hand too aggressively. President Bush has taken the remarkable step in this campaign of addressing only loyal audiences. Often those who wish to attend his speeches are required to sign statements of support for his re-election. He has not faced a skeptical audience, let alone a hostile one -- except the United Nations General Assembly, whose members do not vote in U.S. elections -- for many months. In consequence he has taken on a cheerleader's role. He speaks as one who assumes the friendliness, even the adoration, of his audience.

The result is a manner that is less democratic than demagogic. Even Ronald Reagan, the most right-wing and populist modern president before Bush, was careful to portray himself as a mild-mannered charmer. George W. Bush gives every evidence of having a bully's character. He likes to threaten, intimidate, and denounce. Scorn and contempt are essential to his emotional palette. Addressing only his most adamant supporters, he has let himself adopt the bully's body language. He thrusts his upper body forward, pumps his neck, lets his mouth fall open in lazy disdain, lets his sentences trail off in ominous tones of disgust and menace. He has perfected the gratification of those who already adore him, at the cost of his ability to communicate with those who might doubt him. His flavor is rancid, but devotees love it.

During the first debate, voters seem to have decided they didn't regard the election as a Bush rally, and didn't admire the president's swagger and stammer as much as he seemed to expect. Polls nationwide showed that Kerry took the race from a several-point deficit to a tie after the first debate. That week, the final report of the chief U.S. weapons inspector for Iraq confirmed that Saddam Hussein had neither illegal weapons nor a significant weapons program after 1993 -- that is, that the war's rationale was unfounded. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the occupation government during its first year, acknowledged that the U.S. had never had enough troops in Iraq to keep the peace after the invasion. Bush's luster as a "war president" seemed to come off entirely. Kerry's supporters began to feel a nervous ecstasy at the prospect of a victory they feared had fallen out of reach.

The second debate, on Friday night, settled nothing. Bush had somewhat trimmed his bullying manner, and managed to convey the empathic ordinariness that his supporters love and his detractors regard as a repugnant fraud. Kerry was as sharp as he has been all year, but was not quick -- or lucky -- enough to deliver a rhetorical coup de grace. Instant polling, for what it's worth, showed that each man's supporters overwhelmingly believed their candidate had won. That result -- effectively a tie, and a missed opportunity for Kerry to put the race away -- quickly became the view of political commentators. The race was very much still on.

I began by referring to the criminality of this analysis. What I mean is that the election is being run substantially on style points, which this analysis tries to illuminate. Style, though, conceals a grim substance.

The voters who will decide the election have paid glancing attention to the events of the last few years. They tune into the debates without confident knowledge of the long arc of the administration's deception on Iraq or the devastating effect of the Bush tax cuts on the United States deficit. They are buffeted by assertion and counter-assertion, and judge the candidates by their appearance of truthfulness -- a quality notoriously easy to falsify.

In the first two presidential debates and the sole vice-presidential debate, there has been hardly a mention of what may the highest stakes of all in this election. If Bush's tax cuts and spending stay in place, the federal government will likely be unable to pay for the country's retirement system, its old-age health care, its loans for (high and rising) students fees, and so forth. President Bush has proposed replacing these programs with private savings accounts, untaxed or taxed at very low rates. The effect would be to take the federal government out of the business of softening inequality, to move the U.S. tax burden decisively from wealth to labor, and to increase greatly the uncertainty and fear ordinary Americans would feel about their lives. The change would move the United States decisively away from the welfare-state civilization of the twentieth-century North Atlantic, toward a libertarian society that, one fears, would resemble Brazil: divided, unequal, and fearful.

This prospect, with the fact that President Bush took the country to on false premises and has refused to admit any mistake in that decision, democratic common sense should have settled the race in Kerry's favor months ago. Instead, in a contest of style and personality, "democratic common sense" means only that voters do not like bullies, do not like to be harangued, and look for signs of steadiness and candor in their leaders. Those are decent instincts. They may even be indispensable to lasting democracy. But they are not enough. Four and one-half hours of debates and many thirty-second television commercial will do more to decide which candidate benefits from these attitudes than all the facts of the last four years. But the facts will decide the future of the country.

All now hangs by a thin thread of images. Bismarck once remarked that God seemed to offer special protection to fools, drunks, and the United States of America. This year, it is necessary to hope that the protection holds; but relying on it is a luxury we cannot afford now, if we ever could.