Reality Check

[Keirsey]

REALITY CHECK

by PHILIP GOUREVITCH
John Kerry’s Iraq attack.

Despite a pre-debate “memorandum of understanding” between the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign that there would be no televised “cutaways” or reaction shots, more than sixty-two million Americans watched George W. Bush appear to come unglued while hearing, for the first time, John Kerry’s forceful voice of opposition.

Bush’s face betrayed him on the very first cutaway. He had insisted that the focus of his initial encounter with Kerry, in Coral Gables, Florida, be foreign policy and national security—the issues on which, as a self-proclaimed “war President,” he believes himself to be strongest, and on which he has staked his bid for a second term—yet, barely a minute into the debate, he had been subjected to more direct criticism than he had endured in public in the previous four years, and it soon became obvious that he couldn’t take it. A coin toss had earned Kerry the opening question—“Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?”—and, with his answer, he established a command of the room that he never relinquished. “Yes, I do,” Kerry said. “I believe America is safest and strongest when we are leading the world and we are leading strong alliances. I’ll never give a veto to any country over our security. But I also know how to lead those alliances. This President has left them in shatters across the globe, and we’re now ninety per cent of the casualties in Iraq and ninety per cent of the costs. I think that’s wrong, and I think we can do better.” Kerry spoke with confidence and a newfound crispness, and, as he went on, there was Bush on the split screen, looking irked and puckered.

The President held his head slightly cocked and low to his shoulders, and his expressions kept shifting, in increments of wincing aggravation—lips drawn tight and downward, nostrils flaring and flattening, eyebrows wriggling—through a range of attitudes: impatience, boredom, indignation, sourness, imperiousness, contempt. This unhappy twitchiness persisted through the evening, as Kerry, the former prosecutor, laid out with cool composure the case for firing Bush, and established his own credibility as a Presidential replacement. Bush, even when he had the floor, grimaced as he spoke, except on several occasions when he lost his way and a look of total erasure came over him, a blank, stricken stare for which the French, alas, have the most apt expression: like a cow watching a train go by.

You didn’t need to be rooting for Bush to be distressed by the spectacle of his discombobulation. You needed only to care for the Republic. Bush takes credit for “changing the world,” and there’s no question that in leading the country to war in Iraq he has altered the international political landscape, and America’s position in it, more than anyone in nearly half a century. The Republican domination of both houses of Congress has allowed him to do this almost by fiat, without domestic political resistance or accountability. At the White House, too, Bush is ferociously insulated from exposure to opinions that deviate from the party line. He does not like to be questioned and has little use for argument. Logic has never been his strong suit; in justifying his policies and actions, he prefers stonewalling (admit no error, and ignore or deny bad news) and tautology (I do what’s right because it’s right, and it’s right because I do it). Now, faced for the first time in his Presidency with an inescapable adversary, he appeared to experience the debate as an insult. At times he sulked, at times he winced, as Kerry picked apart the Administration’s catastrophic Iraq adventure. “I didn’t need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations,” Bush protested. “I decided to go there myself.” And, a bit later, “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041018fa_fact1



“But I have news for President Bush,” he said. “Just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”