Can Bush Save Bush?
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; Page A17
....This descent into the fog of Freudian politics is, I know, just the sort of thing Washington eschews. Such musings lack position papers or paper trails -- paper of any kind, actually -- and rely instead on elastic language sometimes known as psychobabble. Yet those of us who are both fathers and sons know the truth of these matters. There is no more complicated relationship on the face of the earth. It is fraught with competition, a kind of canine sniffing that is suffused with both an edgy rivalry and an immense love that does not quit even with the grave. If I say that George W. Bush was out to both vanquish and redeem his father, many a man will know what I mean.
But I don't have to say it. Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's close friend and his former national security adviser, says it for me. This is what Woodward writes about Scowcroft: "In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn't decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster."
It was not only Scowcroft, though, who thought -- or feared -- that Bush had approached the challenge of Saddam Hussein the wrong way. There are suggestions in the book that both of Bush's parents felt that way. Woodward quotes a conversation Barbara Bush had with former senator David Boren, an old family friend, in which she says that she and her husband are "worried" about Iraq -- with the former president "losing sleep over it." Boren asks why the father did not talk to the son.
"He doesn't think he should unless he's asked," Barbara Bush said.
I go on about this matter because in Woodward's book, as with everything else I've read about the 43rd president, it's apparent that Bush had no reason to run for the office other than to satisfy some psychological compulsion -- and had no accomplishment to his name that did not stem from primogeniture. Especially in foreign policy, he was an ignoramus who smugly thought that his instincts trumped experience and knowledge. What's even more appalling is that over and over in Woodward's book, Bush sticks to his losing hand, refusing to challenge his own assumptions -- or, it seems, his steadfast belief that his is a divine mission....(G)iven the nature of the problem, maybe it would be best if the father shed his reluctance and offered his son some sharp advice. After all, it is now clear that the finest service one president can provide another -- not to mention his country -- is to reassert a parental role. The kid's in way over his head.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100200931.html
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