Way back when the nation was gripped by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan ice skating soap opera, Christopher Buckley wrote a hilarious piece in the New Yorker on how Tonya Harding could recoup her public image. Many things were suggested, including dropping the "Jaws" theme as her long program music, but the highlight was his advice that she should get off the plane in wherever the Olympics were that year, carrying a small terminally ill child who would at that point express her dying wish to see Tonya win the Olympic gold medal.
I think we saw Dubya's similar moment today, the form of his "meeting" with the young autistic boy who shot several 3-pointers for his high school basketball team.
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I have actually been too disgusted to watch any of the myriad news accounts of this event, but I've seen enough footage to make me ill without watching the whole thing: the young autistic boy is filmed on the tarmac next to Air Force One, arm in arm with Bush, both grinning broadly. I'm sure Bush made some characteristically awkward comments designed to show his empathy for a plucky young man's efforts despite all odds.
But what does this show about this man and his crew? Can such a photo op actually produce any positive feelings among the 66% of Americans who wish he'd just go away? Or, and I believe this is more likely, will it simply reinforce their feelings of revulsion for a plastic man who would so obviously attempt to worm his way into a genuinely sweet story in a transparent attempt to shore up his decaying public image and support? Is the White House - read Rove - really so obtuse, or am I just so reflexively disgusted by Bush that I'm reading this wrong?
What I really want to know is what this kid's parents were thinking, to allow their child to be so cynically used in this way. It's like a moment out of "Bob Roberts" in its plasticity and cruelty - and I cannot imagine allowing my son to be trotted out as a prop for a politician who's rotting from within before our eyes. Perhaps they're part of that die-hard 34%, or perhaps they just couldn't say no to "The PRESIDENT"! It's just disgusting either way, I'm sad to say.
And finally what can we conclude from the media's complicity in this? It was on at least CNN, MSNBC and ABC evening news, so I assume it was everywhere else as well - now, there was some commentary on ABC about presidents loving to use feel-good stories to their advantage, so a bit of push-back may have occurred. But the picture IS the story - and that picture was everywhere.
I didn't think my disgust could go any higher - and I know this is trivial compared to the thousands of young soldiers returning from Iraq with lifelong disabilities, and the thousands who will never return either to this country, or to their lives in their own country of Iraq. But it just seemed to me to epitomize Bush - sort of in the way Nixon was summed up by his bewildering walk among anti-war demonstrators in DC. Boy in a bubble, indeed.