Sunday, June 13, 2004

That's COLD

Frank Rich on the Reagan-Bush comparisons:

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of close campaigns.

... but oh, so true. (Read the whole thing - it's great.)

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