The Ideological Impostor

First, in his own goofy way he's a political natural, a nice guy. His political style has a chumminess and warm physicality that's disarming. It's easy to detest his policies but not so easy to hate the man. The first time I watched him at close range, he was working a room of Democratic senators (he'd boldly solicited an invitation to a Democratic Caucus retreat and I was an invited speaker). That's when I realized how much his critics had underestimated the man as a politician. Bush was off script and off the record, and he did just fine at the banter. The wisecracks were spontaneous and smart. Indeed, if Clinton alienated because he was too clever by half, Bush endears when it turns out he's not as dumb as you thought. You're waiting for him to stumble and you're charmed when he doesn't.

Second, Bush has absolutely superb handlers and tacticians. His speechwriter, Michael Gerson, is so gifted that he could make a trained monkey sound like Thomas Jefferson. Karl Rove, his political grand strategist, has perfected a game of leaving the Democrats with no popular issues on the table. If Democrats are for Social Security, so is Bush. If they back patients' rights and prescription drugs, so does he. If they embrace kids, he does them one better. Bush then takes away in the fine print everything that he offers in the headlines. Politically, alas, this is mere detail -- so much policy wonkery. The betrayal enrages experts and advocates but can be dealt with by creative obfuscation when it comes to the voters. But what does that say about the voters?

Here we have the third and most alarming factor. This is an era in which voters are unusually quiescent. For two decades, expectations about what government can do have been so lowered -- and here many Democrats are just as culpable as Republicans -- that the broad public doesn't get terribly indignant about betrayals, much less of the ideological kind. The public has come to expect government to jerk people around. When Bush breaches a promise, it only confirms the general suspicion that government can't be trusted anyway. And the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't have a clear opposition ideology makes Bush's task that much easier.