It takes a particular kind of courage these days to admit that at one time you were not only a Bush supporter, but a loyal, enthusiastic, card-carrying member of the President's booster club, a man about whom you shouted from the rafters, hoping to draw anyone to your way of thinking.
I imagine it's like someone having to admit to a room full of decent people that he used to huff whippets out back of the Safeway on Friday nights, alone and pantless, holding only a stripped down Barbie Doll while humming Pet Shop Boys songs. I imagine it's like someone having to tell people that he is a Yankees fan. It's humiliating and sad.
But there comes a point where one must grasp the demons that come with hitting rock bottom. There comes a point where one must admit to the errors of his ways, or be lost forever. There comes a point where one must confess, if only to ensure that the sins of the past never take root again.
My name is Lars Thorwald. And I am a recovering Loyal Bushie.
Act I: Alex P. Keaton Slouches Toward Bethlehem to Be Born
I was born in a steel town in Southern Ohio 37 years ago today. By the time I was 12 the plants had closed and jobs were gone, and once proud men had to take work from wherever they could find it, just to make ends meet. My family was not spared. My uncles and aunts who once forged steel now made pancakes for fat truckers, or mowed lawns for the wealthier citizens in town. All of this happened under both Democrats and Republicans. Betrayal erased partisanship, and I grew up unanchored to any political mooring.
My parents divorced and we moved to Virginia, where my mother had been raised. We lived in Norfolk, a Navy town, and my mother remarried to a Navy Chief who had spent several tours in Vietnam decades earlier, on a river boat. He had bayonet scars to prove it.
I don't know where or how my political inculcation as a Republican began. Neither of my parents were political. My mother had been burnt by politicians of all stripes and had the calluses on her hands to prove it. My Dad (a title my stepfather had earned after several tough years) never spoke of politics. Vietnam, I guess, did that to people. Neither voted. Neither expressed any interest. The only time my dad ever made any kind of political statement was when Reagan was inaugurated the secnd time. He actually watched it on TV, and when it ended he said, "Good man."
I suppose I was razzled and dazzled, in my adolescent days, by the bright, primary colors of the Reagan Presidency. I loved television as a child, and was always the kid who ooohed and ahhed loudest during the Fourth of July fireworks, and I never did my homework. So naturally I loved Reagan.
I went through high school as Red as Red can get without actually being maroon. I was always lukewarm on religion, a natural consequence of being raised Catholic, and the question of abortion never amounted to a big issue in my life. But I loved the kickass, no-shit way we dealt with Libya, and the position of being the Good Guys against the evil Soviet Empire. We were Luke and Han and the gang. They were Vader and endless ranks of stormtroopers.
In the first election I could vote in I voted Republican, straight down the line. I hated taxes and welfare and eople I thought didn't take responsibility. There is actual, existing videotape of me being interviewed on local news, me, a young Republican, expressing the confident position that Bob Dole would get my high school mock primary vote, which he did. When it came down to the election for real, I mightly pulled the lever for George H.W. Bush. Dukakis, mealy and hand-wringing in that stupid army helmet, was never going to get my vote. In fact, no Democrat ever would.
I started law school the year of the 1992 election. No amount of partisan identity could make me pull the lever for Bush again, not after the recession that hit our area so hard, not after the transparent bullshit claim that Clarence Thomas was "the best qualified man for the job."
So for the first time in five years of voting (I never missed any election, and I never will), I voted for a Democrat, Bill Clinton.
Was it his policies I embraced? Or was it the sunny optimism he promised after several years of slate gray Bushonomics? Was I still the kid who loved the fireworks, a sucker for the razzle dazzle? I don't know. What I do remember is that I debated voting for Clinton long and hard, and when I pulled that lever, I did it with reluctance.
Fast forward to 1996. There was Dole, looking tired and disinterested, falling off stages and barking his stump speech. Almost a decade of Dole growing more tired and old had ebbed any admiration I once had. He was, in essence, McCain before McCain was McCain.
It is no understatement to say that I anguished over my vote, and did not know until the final days of the election whether to vote for Perot or Clinton. And then Ross Perot went even crazier, so I pulled the lever for Clinton. But this time, a little less reluctantly.
Act II: Does This Brown Shirt Make Me Look Fat?
This is how I became a Loyal Soldier for George W. Bush:
Bill Clinton, a man who I came to respect and even admire after he convinced me to vote for him a second time, stood up on television and lied to me. I remember where I was at that moment. I was standing in a restaurant holding a cup of coffee, mesmerized by the television. The President was set to address rapidly developing rumors and stories that he had had a sexual relationship with an intern half his age in the Oval Office.
You know the scene. Clinton comes in, points his finger, angered at the suspicion of my fellow Americans--at my suspicion--and denies it ever happened. He did not have sex with that woman.
I remember, too, where I was when I saw the news story that confirmed that his angry denial was a bald-faced lie. I was sitting on my couch with friends, watching the news. I don't remember the story. I don't remember what particular fact confirmed it. All I remember is looking over at my best friend, a Democrat, who looked at me with abject hurt in her eyes and said, "That motherfucker lied to us."
That planted a very deep seed of betrayal that grew very rapidly into hatred, watered into life by the revelation of Clinton's additional lies, under oath.
I know the arguments. I know about the smear tactics and the hatred on the Right for the man, and the pounding of the drums for blood by those who opposed him. The vast right-wing conspiracy. The political bloodsport at play. I knew all that, even then.
But I knew three other things, too. Trained as a lawyer and as someone who loves the law, I first knew that telling the truth under oath was a bedrock on which our system relied. The second thing I knew, from reading the deposition transcript and watching him testify, was that Clinton had violated that trust. He had lied under oath. This went against everything I believed in and I could not reconcile it as being anything other than a wholly unforgivable act by the President.
The third thing I knew--the worst thing--was that he had handed his enemies the knotted rope with which to hang him. He was stupid. He was stupid.
After that, I could not stand with him. I eagerly argued with friends that he should, in fact, be impeached, though I was more ambivalent about whether he should be removed from office.
Just as I could not stand with Clinton, I could not stand with his Vice President. I was engaged in massive transference and could not separate Clinton from Gore, a man whose condemnation of the President was understandably, but regrettably, missing. The simple fact was, every time I thought of Gore I thought of Clinton. There was no way I could vote for Gore. No way.
But there was this, too:
Up from Texas came a white-hatted cowboy.
Here came the anti-Clinton. Here came a man who promised to restore integrity to the White House. Here came a man who promised to be a uniter, not a divider. A man who promised to be campassionate, and not just conservative. A man who said we needed to be humble in our foreign policy. A man who, I was convinced, would help clear off the table after the last two years of scandal and filth. A man who would paint the walls white again.
Here came George W. Bush.
I had voted Democratic, twice, for the same man. And that man had lied to me and angered me in a way that I never could have imagined about a politician. I didn't just walk back to the Red folds of the Republican flag, I fucking ran. I dodn't just want to elect George W. Bush. I wanted to crush Gore.
Policy had little to do with it. Competence even less so. I was scorned and I wanted all the pain to go away. I wanted to get back to a good place. I wanted to get Republicans in office, especially Bush. I wanted this country to be, from Bar Harbor to Orange County, a Red Nation. I wanted the Republican Party--I wanted my Republican Party--to trounce the opposition. I wanted liberals out, done, gone. I wanted to march from Texas to the White House flying tiumphant banners of victory for the Grand Old Party.
I was, again, a Republican. My brief flirtation with Democratic affiliation had left me bruised and angered. I would always be a Republican.
For the 2000 election, I worked my ass off to get George Bush elected.
I handed out literature. I worked phone lines. I wore buttons and gave money to the cause. I was a Bush man, from head to toe, and on election night I threw the biggest party and shouted the loudest of them all when Fox called it for my man. My man. George W. Bush. My man.
And I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that George Walker Bush would be a great President.
One of our finest.
Act III: Like Revenge of the Sith, But With Fewer Wookies
How does one go from being the chapter president of the George W. Bush teenage fanclub--a person who would have giggled into his princess phone with his girlfriends about W like he was a Tiger Beat idol, if only he had had a princess phone--to outspoken critic not only of him but of his entire party and ideology in less than three years?
How does one go from crooning about our beloved leader like Sandra Dee in a 50s film one day to being the moral equivalent of Lori Berenson at an MTRA party railing against the government the next?
George Bush was right about one thing: his Presidency was hard work.
It requires a special kind of nose-to-the-grindstone discipline to push a deeply-rooted supporter over to ardent detractor. The effort it takes to create an absolute critic out of an unalloyed supporter can only be described as Herculean. But, by God, the man did it.
Does anyone remember--in what seems like a thousand years ago--the spy plane incident over China crisis? This was in early 2001, shortly after the President took office. That was handled so inexpertly that it couldn't have been chalked up to mere this-is-my-first-day-on-the-job-so-I-don't-know-where-the-toner-is inexperience. Bush and his team almost jostled that incident into Cuba in October II: Electric Boogaloo, until Colin Powell got in there and got his hands dirty.
That was the last Bush foreign policy success of any measure, and still it planted a seed of doubt in my mind.
Think about the magnitude of what I just wrote: The last real Bush foreign policy success was in 2001, and even then it made people scratch their chins and wonder, Gee, I don't know.....
The rest of 2001 was pretty much vacation time for Bush, but then we got to August 2001, when Bush made his address to the nation on his stem cell research decision.
I watched that address live with my then-fiancee-now-wife, who was also a Republican. After the President detailed in an almost too-painful-to-watch manner the ham-handed decision that pleased no one and did even less to promote scientific research and asked God to bless the United States and signed off, we cut off the TV and sat in silence. Neither said anything, but our looks spoke volumes. We may have elected an idiot, our eyes said. I think we both got drunk that night.
And then there were the tax cuts.
I think people forget those three major events because we live in a world now shaped by the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon and on a plane-load of innocents in Pennsylvania. But I remember the Chinese plane incident and the stem cell decision because they were the two events that firmly planted seeds of grave doubt in my mind about the man I thought I adored.
I don't need to catalogue the astonishingly perfect series of missteps, bad decisions, stupid moves, acts of jaw-dropping incredulity that followed over the next three years after September 11. But here are just some of the lilypads, in no particular order, that carried this here frog from one bank of opinion about the President to the other:
No Child Left Behind. 6.2% unemployment. Privitazation of Social Security. Cutting the NIH budget. Appointing Elmer Gantry to the FDA. Removing Whitman from the EPA. Withdrawing support for Kyoto. Clear Skies Initiative. NSA wiretaps. Iraq. Going to war with the army you have, not the army you want. Chalabi. Yellowcake. Iran. Heckuva Job, Brownie. Stay the Course. My Pet Goat.
I could go on and on, but there were many other, graver, more dangerous things that convinced me not only had I made a mistake--a massive, egrgious, horrible mistake--but that the man was more than just a bad president. There were things that convinced me that he cared less about the law than Clinton ever did. There were things he did that made lying about sex under oath seem like littering in the park.
Declaring the Geneva Accords a quaint set of norms that had no application to detainees, only a relative handful of whom had even the slightest connection to al Qaeda, the rest of whom had done nothing wrong. This brought us on par with our internment of the Japanese.
Then there was the extraordinary rendition programs that echoed Stalinist gulags. Abu Ghraib, which bore the strong whiff of the Hanoi Hilton, except we were Ho Chi Minh. The NSA wiretaps that take us out of any good historical analogy and right into the realm of Philip K. Dick.
And then--the thing that astonished me most, for some reason--was the abandonemnt of habeas corpus. Eviscerating that principle, upon which this nation was founded, hit me the hardest. I was a lawyer, and I knew what it all meant. To Hell with Alito and Roberts as sources of hand-wringing. Here was the President gutting the Constitution itself, cutting out the middlemen.
And the rest of the Republican Congress went along. Danced along, cheering.
I remember my wife and I finally seeing the second-to-last Star Wars film on DVD sometime before the election, and I remember getting sick, not just because of the amateurish writing and two-dimensional acting.
"Ugh," I said to my wife, "We have become the Empire."
"Well, babe, we got no one else to blame," said my wife. "Because we voted for the guy in the black cloak."
By the time the election came around, I no longer believed Bush would be a great president. Instead, I would have lengthy debates with co-workers who felt the same way I did over the issue of who was the worst president: Buchanan or Bush.
I no longer have that debate.
Act IV: What Have You Learned, Dorothy?
There's a scene in my mind, from early fall 2004, when my parents came to my house for a visit. I was standing in my front yard with a rubber mallet pounding a Kerry/Edwards sign in my lawn when their car pulled up. It was a bright autumn day and neighbors were out cleaning gutters, mowing lawns, watching their kids playing in the street. It's a decidedly Republican neighborhood, and I was sure they were all evaluating me as some kind of pinko commie, but I didn't care. It felt good to do it.
My dad the retired Navy Chief got out of the car, and as my mom went to say hello to my wife and see our two kids in the driveway, he walked over to where I was standing.
He considered the sign for a moment, and then me. And in a moment that plays out like a bizzarre opposite of those Army Commercials where the father tells the son how proud he is for joining the Army, my Dad said to me: "I'll tell you what, this Iraq thing is a mess, isn't it? It's just like Vietnam all over again."
That was the first time I had ever heard my dad utter the word Vietnam, let alone anything deeply political.
I didn't carry the conversation further than saying, "Sure is," because I didn't need to.
I had changed. My wife had changed. Friends of mine had changed. And when my dad said what he said, there on my lawn, I knew that a part of him had changed, too.
There were a lot of us who had. Not enough, as it turned out, not then.
But we were a nation in change. I think that change continues. Polls reflect it, the elections have reflected it. The public deate reflects it.
And in the end, I think this confession comes with this small message of hope. We are a nation of people who can change.
And with that change comes promise.
That's what I believe, anyway.