The Madness of George II
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
Who advises President Bush about public relations? Leona Helmsley?
We're into the second week since the furore erupted over what he knew about Osama bin Laden's plans to hijack commercial airliners, and there's still a furore. There's no excuse for that.
I don't even have a public, and I know how to handle this one. How come the leader of the most powerful nation on earth doesn't?
The Clinton administration knew how to handle problems like this. Of course you remember the grisly fiasco at Waco. That's the one that started with a frontal assault in broad daylight on a building full of heavily armed fanatics, an engagement sickeningly reminiscent of Dieppe and of the charge of the Light Brigade, and ended with the government ramming a tank into the same giant building, which was known to be full of containers of explosive gas.
Regardless of whether the final holocaust was the accidental result of the tank attack or the deliberate result of the actions of the besieged fanatics, it was eminently predictable. Someone in authority should have predicted it and taken another approach. But the Clinton Administration knew how to deal with this problem.
They dealt with it in the way that competent politicians deal with these problems these days. Janet Reno got up and said she "accepted responsibility" for it.
Ms Reno did not resign. She was not dismissed. Modern political conceptions of the responsibility of the politician do not extend as far as actually being punished for a mistake. There is a good reason for that.
The contemporary politician understands that the modern, now, self-authenticated public isn't interested in anything so tawdry as blame. Goodness! That would be judgmental! No, what the public wants is for someone to, as the saying goes, accept ownership of the problem. Then we can all relax, those of us who support the politician in question enjoying the pride we feel at his or her forthright honesty, and the rest of us happy that our guy seems to have scored a point. Nothing will have changed, but we will be satisfied. Self-justification is our great desire these days, and "responsible" politicians give it to us.
I realize Ms Reno is a far more imposing figure than Mr. Bush. She is a more imposing figure, in fact, than any president since Lyndon Johnson. However, if Mr. Bush had followed her example we'd all be much happier today.
All he had to do was get up and say he took responsibility for the decisions that had been made, that he and his administration had believed those decisions to be correct at the time, but that they had underestimated the enormity of the evil motivating Osama bin Laden. He would have appeared frank, forthright, and even a mite presidential. But Mr. Bush's advisors decided otherwise.
The brilliant strategy they came up with was to state over and over that they had not received a specific warning. As more news of the warning they had in fact received came out, it became clear that that was like saying that the warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was also ignored but never reached the president, had also been unspecific. "Yes, we were warned that Japanese bombers were flying towards Hawaii, but no one told us specifically that they were going to Pearl Harbour, or that they planned to drop their bombs."
When that strategy failed the administration fell back on issuing a security alert every half hour. I believe the last one alerted us that al-Qaeda plans to booby trap minature golf courses with exploding windmills.
By going along with these feckless approaches, President Bush is destroying the credibility he has built up for himself. It would be much better not only for him but for America and its allies if he fearlessly "accepted responsibility."
Accept responsibility, Mr. President. Accept it now. Accept responsibility for Enron, too. You'll feel better, America will feel better, and having masterfully resolved these issues you'll have a reason to take another vacation.
May 2002
The Madness of George II © Coolth, 2002
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