On ongoing
series of close-readings of Bush utterances:
At an event in Denver last Monday, [Bush] mused that sending out quarterly statements for the individual investment accounts he wants to add to Social Security could encourage people to pay more attention to government but then chuckled that investors might conclude from tepid returns that "maybe we ought to change presidents or something."
--
New York Times, "President Bush's New Public Face: Confident and 'Impishly Fun'" (3/28/05)
How revealing is that?
First, the entire remark is premised on the presumption that the more scrutiny to which he and his policies are subjected, the more likely it is that voters will see that they've been duped. His whole politics is founded upon an assumption of voter (and press)
inattentiveness, and, just as his father would famously read out his own cue-card instructions ("Message: I care"), here Bush raises subtext to the level of explicit statement. The only question is whether this is because he is incapable of dissembling sophisticatedly and can't help telegraphing his own cynical motivations and self-awareness, or whether, as the rest of the article seems to imply, he just doesn't give a crap anymore.
And second, it represents an explicit admission that the economic argument for dismantling Social Security is bankrupt, since it recognizes that the actual, inevitably disappointing investment returns of "personal accounts" are liable to be a serious political problem for some President in the future. But it won't be an issue for him because, as he likes to point out, by then "We'll all be dead."
I also particularly enjoyed this piece of introspection on the part of our "impishly fun" Commander in Chief:
At a news conference last week, Mr. Bush joked that he did not have the time "to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?' "
Fascinating. In a single sentence, Bush manages to allude to, and trash, Wordsworth, Oliver Stone, and Richard Nixon. Who says Bush doesn't have an inner intellectual life? And even as he does so, he once again asserts the fundamental insignificance of a sense of history. To wonder about one's relation to the past, and the future, is a chump's game. What matters is the Eschatological Now ("Hey, let's drill in ANWR! Let's eviscerate health care/education/consumer protections/whatever! We'll all be dead!"). And scarily, Bush & Co. are counting on American voters sharing this sense of existential nihilism, and on their microscopically brief political and cultural memories. As one of his footsoldiers pointed out this week, on the question of whether Tom DeLay's prominence in the Schiavo debacle could hurt him with voters in the future,
"I am not sure it raised [DeLay's] name ID," said Carl M. Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "A month from now, people are not going to remember," he said, and 20 months from now, in the 2006 elections, "it will be irrelevant."
"People are not going to remember." It's the central tenet of Bushism.