Columnist
Can George W. Bush really reinvent himself at this point in his beleaguered tenure? Does he really want to?
As a boyish governor and presidential candidate, he mocked a death-row prisoner out of one corner of his mouth while muttering bromides about compassionate conservatism out of the other. Later, as his party’s smirking, squinting nominee, he bumbled and stuttered through his first debates, coming off as a tentative climber struggling to fill his old man’s shoes.
Bush has grown older, but there is woefully little indication that he has matured. Instead of wise and thoughtful, he often seems addled and vaguely annoyed, as if just roused from a particularly satisfying dream. That certainly seems to have been the case with Hurricane Katrina. Slow to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, Bush has been playing catch-up ever since.
So it is that we must regard his Sept. 15 speech in New Orleans’ Jackson Square with a substantial measure of skepticism. Can he really transform himself from a “what, me worry?” chief executive into the visionary leader of a nationwide army of compassion, as he suggested during his prime-time address?
Maybe. It is never too late, as George Eliot once observed, to become what you might have been.
Bush might have been a president who worked harder to amend “the legacy of inequality” that he now acknowledges. He might have expanded his interest in economic issues to include the ground-level needs of the poor and not merely the loftier concerns of estate heirs and oil firms. He might have been a president who showed some demonstrative interest in healing the divisions in this country that his controversial 2000 election helped expose.
Instead, he rigidly pursued the path of least compromise. Now he tells those same divided Americans that the recovery of New Orleans depends upon “the creative skill and generosity of a united country.”
Last week, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana told Newsweek about borrowing a FEMA official’s phone while standing outside the Superdome during those first dark days after the storm. When she discovered the phone didn’t work, she said, “I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t going to be pretty.'” Many Americans watching Bush’s speech must have had similar thoughts when he offered his overdue suggestions about the need to pull together. The president continues to lag a beat behind.
He follows the trail of the real “armies of compassion” whose ranks did not wait for the president to return from his vacation. Their volunteering and acts of charity from all over the globe have formed a potent antidote to the violent, criminal acts that compounded the initial tragedy of the hurricane. Thanks to their exemplary labors, the storm-stricken along the Gulf Coast have indeed, as Bush said, gotten the message that “they can count on someone who cares.”
But for the nation’s 37 million poor, that “someone” has seldom been the federal government. The United States continues to have the highest poverty rate of any industrialized nation. The Bush White House must suddenly develop an interest in this sad fact if it wishes to keep a shred of its credibility.
During his speech, Bush spoke with minimum smirk. He accepted responsibility for his administration’s failures in the wake of the hurricane. He also spoke with feeling of Americans’ “faith in God no storm can take away.” As Bush knows, our faith in presidents is far less reliable. As gas prices and the body count in Iraq continue to rise, his own approval ratings continue to fall.
For many, belief in a deity depends comfortably on the evidence of things unseen. Where presidents are concerned, the levels of accountability and expectation are vastly different.
A former reporter for the American, Jabari Asim is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is asimj@washpost.com.