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Sunday, February 20, 2005
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WHEREIN PRESIDENT BUSH GETS INTERESTING
If there's one thing I love, it is hearing public figures speaking without any regard to popular opinion. Of course, you will never hear them speak this way in public, so you have to rely on some pretty sneaky bastards to get the skinny.
Such convrsations are all the more interesting when one of the speakers is the president of the United States. Knowing what someone who can end human life on this planet really thinks is fascinating. This is why I lull myself to sleep each night with the Watergate tapes. I love those tapes.
It turns out that then governor George Bush was secretly taped by an associate of his father's during the 2000 campaign. These tapes rveal more about the President than he himself ever has. And truth be told, I like what I hear.
The tapes were made between 1998 and 2000 and are, as I mentioned, highly enlightening on Mr. Bush's beliefs, motives, strategic decisions and political judgement.
First, let's look at the President's history of illegal drug use. Many forget that rumours of cocaine use were a major factor in the 2000 race. This, combined with the last minute revelation of a 1976 DWI arrest, may have cost Governor Bush the popular vote. It is important to remember that on the Friday before the election, Bush was favoured to win by 3 to 5 points in every single major poll. On Election Day, he ended up losing by over half a million votes.
The governor refused to address any drug history publicly, but he did do so privately.
Mr. Bush, who has acknowledged a drinking problem years ago, told Mr. Wead on the tapes that he could withstand scrutiny of his past. He said it involved nothing more than "just, you know, wild behavior." He worried, though, that allegations of cocaine use would surface in the campaign, and he blamed his opponents for stirring rumors. "If nobody shows up, there's no story," he told Mr. Wead, "and if somebody shows up, it is going to be made up." But when Mr. Wead said that Mr. Bush had in the past publicly denied using cocaine, Mr. Bush replied, "I haven't denied anything."
He refused to answer reporters' questions about his past behavior, he said, even though it might cost him the election. Defending his approach, Mr. Bush said: "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."
He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said.
Bush knew the consequences of this course, as is made clear in this passage,
Later, however, Mr. Bush worried that his refusal to answer questions about whether he had used illegal drugs in the past could prove costly, but he held out nonetheless. "I am just not going to answer those questions. And it might cost me the election," he told Mr. Wead.
And I believe that it did. Compounded by the '76 arrest, the drug rumours sunk him in the popular vote. I can't think of any other reason for such a massive shift in voting patterns in just three days. I've never seen anything like it, before or since.
I love that American voters are so consumed with drug histories, particularly when they know - or should know - that President Kennedy was a regular user of cocaine, methamphetemine and steroids while he was president. To find someone else who went to work that stoned, you'd have to go back to John Belushi. No one has yet suggested that George Bush was getting high when he was running for president, although it would explain his sentence structure.
However, Bush does seem to refute the cocaine rumours by saying, "If nobody shows up, there's no story, and if somebody shows up, it is going to be made up." It is important to remember that Mr. Bush believed this to be a private conversation and was unaware that it was being recorded. A private denial seems to be the last word on the cocaine story. And to think it only took seven years.
Bush did seem to sympathize with the personal pecadillos of public figures though.
In August 1998, he worried that the scandals of the Clinton administration had sharpened journalists' determination to investigate the private lives of candidates. He even expressed a hint of sympathy for his Democratic predecessor.
"I don't like it either," Mr. Bush said of the Clinton investigations. "But on the other hand, I think he has disgraced the nation."
This is where I disagree with Mr. Bush. The investigations regarding President and Mrs Clinton were completely founded. None of them had anything to do with "personal behaviour" on their part, as they would have you believe.
The Whitewater investigation was based on a possible conflict of interest, bank fraud and misuse of the governor's office. President Clinton himself was responsible for Lewinsky coming into the Starr investigation. This is because of the President's decision to use the same "cut out" to deal with annoying witnesses. Vernon Jordan, an uber-powerful Washington lawyer used his contacts to obtain employment for Webster Hubbell, a key Whitewater witness. Jordan performed the same task for Miss Lewinsky.
The Lewinsky investigation, as much fun as it is to imply otherwise, wasn't about rampant fellatio in the West Wing. It was about perjury, obstruction of justice and using government employees and resources to impede a lawful investigation. Were it merely about knob polishing in the Oval Office, I'd be the first one to complain about that. I think presidents getting anonymous blowjobs on the clock should be mandatory.
I think that Governor Bush was sympathizing more with President Clinton in that they believed they unfairly had their personal lives gone over in public. This is flatly wrong. Bill Clinton ran his first campaign in 1974 and George Bush ran for the first time in 1978. The rules of politics and journalism were pretty well established by then. Watergate and the health revelations of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy had seen to that. Clinton and Bush both got into the game knowing the rules.
Probably most fascinating in the tapes is what it reveals about Mr. Bush's political judgement. His miscalculations about his Republican rivals is staggering. To think that he saw Steve Forbes as the greatest threat to his candidacy is mind-blowing. Steve Forbes is, quite simply, far too odd looking to be elected president and his economic ideas too radical to be taken seriously.
Senator John McCain is dismissed simply in the tapes.
"He's going to wear very thin when it is all said and done," Bush said in January 2000. In fact, McCain wore so thin that he is widely considered to be the front runner for the 2008 Republican nomination.
His views on then Senator John Ashcroft are, all at once, accurate, innacurate and highly frightening.
During the primary contest, Mr. Bush often sized up his dozen Republican rivals, assessing their appeal to conservative Christian voters, their treatment of him and their prospects of serving in a future Bush administration. He paid particular attention to Senator John Ashcroft. "I like Ashcroft a lot," he told Mr. Wead in November 1998. "He is a competent man. He would be a good Supreme Court pick. He would be a good attorney general. He would be a good vice president." (Emphasis added)
When Mr. Wead predicted an uproar if Mr. Ashcroft were appointed to the court because of his conservative religious views, Mr. Bush replied, "Well, tough."
I actually think that Ashcrot did a creditable job as attorney general. After 9/11, any attorney general would have sought as much authority as he did and would probably have used it in much the same way. I can't fault Ashcroft on that.
But Ashcroft had a hard enough time getting confirmed as attorney general. There is no way that the United States Senate would have sent him to the Supreme Court, where he would enjoy lifetime tenure. Its silly to even imagine those confirmation hearings. It would be a bloodbath.
While it is true that Ashcroft won statewide office in Missouri on five seperate occassions, he was a deeply polarizing figure once in the Senate. Having John Ashcroft on the 2000 Republican ticket would have been like Vice President Gore asking Hillary Clinton to be his running mate. Both would bring all negatives and no positives.
In this, Ashcroft's 2000 re-election campaign is educational. While it is true that his opponent, Governor Mel Carnahan defeated Ashcroft three weeks after his death, it is forgotten that the race was the tightest in the country before Carnahan's death. There is little guarantee that Ashcroft could have even delivered Missouri in 2000.
There is also the fact that his faith would have been used to ridicule him. In fact, if Senator Ashcroft were put on a national ticket, his subsequent treatment would make Dan Quayle look like Winston Churchill. It would have been very ugly, but it would have been very, very effective.
The tapes also put George Bush in a very creditable light regarding his feelings toward homosexuals.
Early on, though, Mr. Bush appeared most worried that Christian conservatives would object to his determination not to criticize gay people. "I think he wants me to attack homosexuals," Mr. Bush said after meeting James Robison, a prominent evangelical minister in Texas.
But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: "Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?"
Later, he read aloud an aide's report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however."
"This is an issue I have been trying to downplay," Mr. Bush said. "I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays."
Told that one conservative supporter was saying Mr. Bush had pledged not to hire gay people, Mr. Bush said sharply: "No, what I said was, I wouldn't fire gays."
During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush had everything to lose and almost nothing to gain from this stand. Republicans are expected to attack gays in the campaign, so it would not be held against him during the general election. Refusing to go on the offensive, however, could have thrown Evangelical support to another Republican candidate in the primaries, or worse still, to Patrick Buchannan during the fall campaign. Had the born agains simply stayed home on election day, Bush would have lost the popular vote AND the Electoral College and we would now be discussing President Gore's second term.
This was a very courageous stand for Mr. Bush to take and one that he desrves credit for. He did what he honestly thought was right, despite the political risks.
All told, its a fascinating article. You should read it.
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