http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_559_01.html
The Uncompassionate Conservative
It's not that he's mean. It's just that when it comes to seeing how his
policies affect people, George W. Bush doesn't have a clue.
By Molly Ivins
Mother Jones
November/December 2003 Issue
In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn't get it, you have to take
several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of
class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself
as a perfectly nice fellow -- and who is genuinely disconnected from the
impact of his decisions on people.
On the few occasions when Bush does directly encounter the down-and-out,
he seems to empathize. But then, in what is becoming a recurring, almost
nightmare-type scenario, the minute he visits some constructive program
and praises it (AmeriCorps, the Boys and Girls Club, job training), he
turns around and cuts the budget for it. It's the kiss of death if the
president comes to praise your program. During the presidential debate in
Boston in 2000, Bush said, "First and foremost, we've got to make sure we
fully fund LIHEAP [the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program], which
is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here in the East, pay
their high fuel bills." He then sliced $300 million out of that sucker,
even as people were dying of hypothermia, or, to put it bluntly, freezing
to death.
Sometimes he even cuts your program before he comes to praise it. In
August 2002, Bush held a photo op with the Quecreek coal miners, the nine
men whose rescue had thrilled the country. By then he had already cut the
coal-safety budget at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which
engineered the rescue, by 6 percent, and had named a coal-industry
executive to run the agency.
The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches
that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his
election, Bush had said to him, "I don't understand how poor people
think," and had described himself as a "white Republican guy who doesn't
get it, but I'd like to." What's annoying about Bush is when this
obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as
it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.
There was a telling episode in 1999 when the Department of Agriculture
came out with its annual statistics on hunger, showing that once again
Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger because we
have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like
Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be
first in poverty, first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in
poverty, first in the percentage of adults without a high school diploma,
51st in income per capita, and so on.
When the 1999 hunger stats were announced, Bush threw a tantrum. He
thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state look bad because
he was running for president. "I saw the report that children in Texas are
going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in
this state. You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets
of hunger in Texas." You would, wouldn't you? That is the point at which
ignorance becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time
with people in the colonias, South Texas' shantytowns; he had never been
to a session with Valley Interfaith, a consortium of border churches and
schools and the best community organization in the state. There is no
excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality of Texas.
Take any area -- environment, labor, education, taxes, health -- and go to
the websites of public-interest groups in that field. You will find page
after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals, no-big-deal new policies,
all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent change in
regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below the
radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody's favorite
government program, is being targeted for "improvement" by leaving it to
the tender mercies of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps
refugees in Africa and Asia gets its funding cut because one of the seven
groups involved once worked with the United Nations, which once worked
with the Chinese government, which once supported forced abortions.
So what manner of monster is behind these outrages? I have known George W.
Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely
as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man
shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge
blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity,
anti-intellectualism, and machismo. They all play well politically with
certain constituencies.
Let's assume the religiosity is genuine; no one is in a position to know
otherwise. I leave it to more learned commentators to address what
"Christian" might actually mean in terms of public policy.
The anti-intellectualism is also authentic. This is a grudge Bush has
carried at least since his college days when he felt looked down on as a
frat rat by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools, he
ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy
schools in that time. John F. Kennedy, the consummate, effortlessly
graceful, classy Harvard man, had just been assassinated in ugly old
Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson's public piety gave many people the creeps.
Texans were more or less thought of as yahoo barbarians somewhere between
the Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance. I do not exaggerate by much. To
have a Texas accent in the East in those days was to have 20 points
automatically deducted from your estimated IQ. And Texans have this habit
of playing to the stereotype -- it's irresistible. One proud Texan I know
had never owned a pair of cowboy boots in his life until he got a Nieman
Fellowship to Harvard. Just didn't want to let anyone down.
For most of us who grow up in the "boonies" and go to school in the East,
it's like speaking two languages -- Bill Clinton, for example, is
perfectly bilingual. But it's not unusual for a spell in the East to
reinforce one's Texanness rather than erode it, and that's what happened
to Bush. Bush had always had trouble reading -- we assume it is dyslexia
(although Slate's Jacob Weisberg attributes it to aphasia); his mom was
still doing flash cards with him when he was in junior high. Feeling
intellectually inferior apparently fed into his resentment of Easterners
and other known forms of snob.
Bush once said, "There's a West Texas populist streak in me, and it
irritates me when these people come out to Midland and look at my friends
with just the utmost disdain." In his mind, Midland is the true-blue
heartland of the old vox pop. The irony is that Midland along with its
twin city, Odessa, is one of the most stratified and narrow places in the
country. Both are oil towns with amazingly strict class segregation.
Midland is the white-collar, Republican town; Odessa is the blue-collar,
Democratic town. The class conflict plays out in an annual football
rivalry so intense that H.G. Bissinger featured it in his best-selling
book, Friday Night Lights. To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is
the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is
Levittown.
In fact, people in Midland are real nice folks: I can't prove that with
statistics, but I know West Texas and it's just a fact. Open, friendly, no
side to 'em. The problem is, they're way isolated out there and way
limited too. You can have dinner at the Petroleum Club anytime with a
bunch of them and you'll come away saying, "Damn, those are nice people.
Sure glad they don't run the world." It is still such a closed, narrow
place, where everybody is white, Protestant, and agrees with everybody
else. It's not unusual to find people who think, as George W. did when he
lived there, that Jimmy Carter was leading the country toward
"European-style socialism." A board member of the ACLU of Texas was asked
recently if there had been any trouble with gay bashing in Midland. "Oh,
hell, honey," she drawled, "there's not a gay in Midland who will come out
of the closet for fear people will think they're Democrats."
The machismo is what I suspect is fake. Bush is just another upper-class
white boy trying to prove he's tough. The minute he is questioned, he
becomes testy and defensive. That's one reason they won't let him hold
many press conferences. When he tells stories about his dealings with two
of the toughest men who ever worked in politics -- the late Lee Atwater
and the late Bob Bullock -- Bush, improbably, comes off as the toughest
mother in the face-down. I wouldn't put money on it being true. Bullock,
the late lieutenant governor and W's political mentor in Texas, could be
and often was meaner than a skilletful of rattlesnakes. Bush's story is
that one time, Bullock cordially informed him that he was about to fuck
him. Bush stood up and kissed Bullock, saying, "If I'm gonna get fucked,
at least I should be kissed." It probably happened, but I guarantee you
Bullock won the fight. Bush never got what made Bullock more than just a
supermacho pol -- the old son of a bitch was on the side of the people.
Mostly.
The perfect absurdity of all this, of course, is that Bush's
identification with the sturdy yeomen of Midland (actually, oil-company
executives almost to a man) is so wildly at variance with his real
background. Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father
is that, "He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto
Junior High." He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh
neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in
town (couldn't get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a
legacy.
Jim Hightower's great line about Bush, "Born on third and thinks he hit a
triple," is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that
not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- he's been eating
off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is
because he doesn't admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire
life to being named George W. Bush. He didn't just get a head start by
being his father's son -- it remained the single most salient fact about
him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into
Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he
was turned down by the University of Texas Law School). He got into the
Texas Air National Guard -- and sat out Vietnam -- through Daddy's
influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of
FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the "Fucking Air National
Guard," included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator
Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well -- they just happened
to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil
business by friends of his father. He went broke and was bailed out by
friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by
friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some
fellow Yalies.
That Bush's administration is salted with the sons of somebody-or-other
should come as no surprise. I doubt it has ever even occurred to Bush that
there is anything wrong with a class-driven good-ol'-boy system. That
would explain why he surrounds himself with people like Eugene Scalia (son
of Justice Antonin Scalia), whom he named solicitor of the Department of
Labor -- apparently as a cruel joke. Before taking that job, the younger
Scalia was a handsomely paid lobbyist working against ergonomic
regulations designed to prevent repetitive stress injuries. His favorite
technique was sarcastic invective against workers who supposedly faked
injuries when the biggest hazard they faced was "dissatisfaction with
co-workers and supervisors." More than 5 million Americans are injured on
the job every year, and more die annually from work-related causes than
were killed on September 11. Neither Scalia nor Bush has ever held a job
requiring physical labor.
What is the disconnect? One can see it from the other side -- people's
lives are being horribly affected by the Bush administration's policies,
but they make no connection between what happens to them and the decisions
made in Washington. I think I understand why so many people who are
getting screwed do not know who is screwing them. What I don't get is the
disconnect at the top. Is it that Bush doesn't want to see? No one brought
it to his attention? He doesn't care?
Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and so we have to cut services for the
poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification along the lines
that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something. If
there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to
watch him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely.
Welfare, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps -- horrors, they breed
dependency. Whereas inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole
life handed to you on a platter is good for the grit in your immortal
soul? What we're dealing with here is a man in such serious denial it
would be pathetic if it weren't damaging so many lives.
Bush's lies now fill volumes. He lied us into two hideously unfair tax
cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous consequences; he
lied us into the Patriot Act, eviscerating our freedoms. But when it comes
to dealing with those less privileged, Bush's real problem is not
deception, but self-deception.