If you still need convincing, or you know someone who does, you could do far worse than to read Ron Suskind’s New York Times Magazine piece on Bush’s faith-based cognitive limitations. Often, discussion of the limitations of the president’s intelligence remain at the level of his ‘Bushisms’, which establish little more than his inarticuateness and the likelihood that he is dyslexic. Some of my best friends, however, are dyslexic; there are other kinds of intelligence besides the booklearning that everyone knows Bush lacks (and which, I am convinced, many of his supporters have welcomed). Suskind’s reporting here gives testimony to a far more scary kind of presidential stupidity. However, I fear that Bush’s ability to appeal to American anti-intellectualism will remain undiminished. I’ve heard of candidates not wishing to insult the voters’ intelligence, but Bush’s persona is built upon not wanting to insult his voters’ lack of intelligence.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill. When I quoted O’Neill saying that Bush was like ”a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush’s faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue — public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.”
The most dramatic implication of Bush’s faith-based rigidity, as Suskind frames it, may be the schism it may provoke in the Republican party between the fundamentalists and the old guard Republicans increasingly appalled by Bush’s inability to inhabit a fact-based reality. The disgruntlement of the ‘Reagan Republicans’ with Bush is not a new topic, most recently emerging around Reagan’s death and Bush’s appropriation of his legacy. More’s the pity such profound concerns were not allowed to emerge sooner.
