Reposted from my blog, Bulldog Blue. Read the original post here. Comments or trackbacks to the original site are appreciated.
Few things make for great liberal bedtime reading like Jon Chait's classic TNR column in defense of Bush hatred.
Indeed, Chait makes it seem downright irrational
not to hate the guy. I'm not sure if I personally hate Bush, but this gets it just about exactly right:
To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant.
It makes being a conservative at Yale seem downright easy. But that's not the statement I want to focus on. This is:
During the 1990s, it was occasionally noted that conservatives despised Clinton because he flouted their basic values...In a way, Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a fortune through crony capitalism?
This captures an often-missed point about education. Obviously, I thought Kerry's education plan was completely superior to Bush's, if for no other reason than his obvious willingness, should he become president, to actually fund it. It has always baffled me that a president with unprecedentedly centralized control of literally the entire federal government would fail to fund a centerpiece initiative of his first election campaign, and still be allowed to utter the word "education" during his second campaign without torches and pitchforks appearing in the crowd. Alternate reality, indeed.
But Chait's key insight here is that education uniquely requires a president to display a compelling moral vision. For a lot of kids, especially those in urban communities with schools so riddled with bulletholes they obviate the need for windows, the value of a good education is far from immediately obvious. It is the job of a parent to explain to them the values that make getting an education not only good in a future-financial-benefits way, but also in a way that makes getting an education seem like a moral imperative. But, the president is on TV a lot, and unless every Republican who opened their mouths publicly between 1992 and 2000 was just kidding, the president sets an important moral standard for the nation's youth.
So how has Bush done? While Bush has certainly emphasized morality generally, often to the point that you expect to see him green-screened into some of The Passion of the Christ's gorier scenes, education has been one area in which he's been downright disdainful of the moral issue. Jon Chait is right to observe that any parent who tries to explain the value of academic achievement against the backdrop of a proudly mediocre president is in for a fight and probably for humiliation. But I think if you look at the values that underlie the importance of an education, it goes further.
Take, for example, the simple notion of awareness. Part of the value of an education is that it lets us understand and react to the world around us. In an increasingly complex world, this is an increasingly hard job. So it doesn't help to have a president who publicly disdains books in direct proportion to their length, and who publicly brags about not reading newspapers. (His justification for this is reliably absurd; he does it so as not to be tricked by the Liberal Media into second-guessing himself. The thought of a president so unsure of the rationale for his own decisions that a Maureen Dowd editorial could unhinge his confidence entirely is abjectly horrifying.) To take a more recent example, recall that the 2004 presidential campaign often amounted to a painful re-litigation of the moral justifications for Vietnam. John Kerry, as both his supporters and detractors know, was largely torn in two by the war. But the president, when asked, responded that he remembers being for the war but didn't really give it much thought. Set aside the visceral reaction, which is that a president who didn't do much serious thinking about Vietnam makes our current foreign policy situation seem a little less inexplicable. More troubling, to me, is the message this sends. If I were a grade-schooler hearing this, I'd conclude that I probably didn't need to think much about the Iraq war. (To witness the actual effect of this kind of stuff on a grade-school intellect, we need look no further than Britney Spears.) To discourage deep public thought about what even Bush must realize is the most serious decision a president makes - engaging his constituents in the bloody business of warfare - is to take the notion of moral leadership about as unseriously as you possibly can.
Consider next the notion of tolerance and pluralism. To really be educated, you have to be willing - even eager - to investigate views that diverge sharply from your own. Bush likes to fashion himself a pluralist; witness his absurd non-sequitur in an April press conference, directed to no one in particular, that "the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that." The president deserves some measure of kudos for embracing such an obviously true but still relevant notion. The problem is, he doesn't seem to believe the same to be true of white-skinned people. He openly shuns academia, labelling it a place whose ivory towers house only the nation's pointiest-headed, most elitist liberals, all of whom hail from the vast moral wasteland known as Taxachusetts. In his own leadership, he has made dissent and the exploration of alternative viewpoints literally a punishable offense. It got Paul O'Neill booted, Colin Powell marginalized, and convinced Richard Clarke that the only way to save America was to quit his job. The second-term Bush cabinet has witnessed an unprecedented centralization of power - to Bush's own head. This pathology is on display in our schools, too: Pandagon recently chronicled two cases (here and here) of school districts attempting to institutionalize the equation of science with religious dogma. (Dogma, of course, being by its very nature unquestionable.) Where do you suppose they got the political capital to do that? Bush refuses to allow anything but abstinence-only sex education on his watch, which is great, but abortions have increased by 50,000 on his watch. The message, for those kids who are still even listening: The moral of keeping your hands (or genitals) off of other peoples' genitals (or hands) is more important than the moral of listening to ideas you disagree with.
But the most insidious strain of Bush's anti-pluralistic tendencies, by a long shot, has been his rhetoric on gay marriage. As Andrew Sullivan notes - and on this topic, I trust him - Bush tends to be very tolerant of gays. The same way Mrs. Daisy was tolerant of Morgan Freeman:
The Bush line [on gay rights], essentially is: "We are not homophobes; we are happy yo live alongside gay people, as long as they recognize that they can never have the same civil rights as we do. Accept your own inferiority, and we will accept you."
Bush likes to justify this kind of attitude in the notion that he's simply reflecting the beliefs of the red states, but that's pure fiction. It was the red states who had to deal with the repercussions of - and often lead the fight for - the civil rights movement. Today, travel to the south, and you'll see blacks and whites eating together at lunch counters a lot more than they do at New York's trendiest hotspots. Nothing in the modern history of the south suggests that bigotry is either their core value or their political preference. It does, however, tend to be an inordinately useful tool for their politicians. And lest we forget, we will surely be reminded by the ever-present sight of Bush's Texas "ranch" that he is one of their politicians.
Combine this kind of polarization and endorsement of intolerance with the sudden political ascendancy of the radical Christian right (who I suspect - and hope - depart from most Christians in their rigid distaste for any values different from their own) and you have a fairly explicit message for America's youth: New ideas and different kinds of people are dangerous. Try competing with that for a child's attention. You may as well ship his textbooks back to the publisher.
In 1999, right before Bill Clinton left office, Slate's Timothy Noah wrote a brief and interesting eulogy of his presidency. It was called "In Praise of Clinton's Brain." In it, he observed:
There are many smart people running for president this year, but none of them will likely match Clinton's ability to wear his intelligence so lightly and so well.
What he was getting at, albeit indirectly, is that a president's attitude towards the very notion of intelligence can make or break his ability to morally lead a nation. Clinton, for all his sometimes searing flaws, never missed an opportunity to make being smart (and the things that being smart entails - academic achievement, an embrace of pluralism, an acute fascination with the world around you) seem like a good thing. Bush, on the other hand, seems to actively disdain intelligence, and flaunt his own lack of it - real or not - every chance he gets. For this, President Bush gets an F. And probably receives it with his signature brand of faux-populist defiant pride. It's too bad. America's youth and America's future are significantly worse than the outer limits of their promise because of it.