ONCE AGAIN, The Very Hungry Caterpillar has wormed its way into the news. Rousing himself from the sweltering torpor of his Texas vacation, President Bush earlier this month made his customary visitations to a classroom or two, where TV cameras as usual recorded him perched before an array of schoolchildren, reading aloud. Several news accounts noted that the president’s choice of reading material was this Hungry Caterpillar, a children’s book by Eric Carle, first published in 1969. Trapped in similar venues, the president has read from this book many, many times. One paper even reported that White House aides now travel with a copy of the book, ready to be read from at a moment’s notice should the president suddenly find himself surrounded by kindergartners, as presidents, nowadays, often do. Our commander in chief’s reliance on, and apparent fondness for, The Very Hungry Caterpillar is worth a moment’s thought, as a clue to his own character, on several counts. For one thing, his taste is sound: It’s a charming book. Detractors might point out that it’s oversimple and unambitious, an early product of the era when educators had first begun to realize that the TV-pummeled toddlers left to their care were incapable of grasping any narrative sequence more complicated than a knock-knock joke. But its story line is redeemed by Carle’s illustrations, splashy collages done up in the style of Paul Klee. Over 14 pages they show a caterpillar grow from a tiny egg, resting on a moonlit leaf, to a brilliantly colored butterfly, basking in the sun. The caterpillar’s progress is marked by hearty meals—one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, and so on, through strawberries and oranges, then cupcakes and sausages, and finally, in a climactic binge, a big green leaf. Sated, the protagonist discovers that he has evolved from a very hungry to a very fat caterpillar. So he builds a cocoon and fasts, before emerging at last as the sleek and gorgeous butterfly. I should probably note that with this sentence my description of the book is now longer than the book itself. The president is by no means the only politician to rely on The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It has become a tool of the trade generally. During her run for the Senate last year, for example, Hillary Clinton often read from the book when confronted by preschoolers. For Mrs. Clinton, a bookish woman and an ideologue, the tale likely stands as an environmental allegory: The foods the caterpillar eats are surely treated with organic insecticides—otherwise he, as an insect, would be dead—while, conversely, the orgiastic consumption of the big green leaf could be interpreted as a harrowing account of deforestation. The president, however, is less susceptible to flights of metaphor, and we are safe in supposing that he brandishes the book because he knows it well, can read it handily, and, for these and other reasons, likes it. He likes it so much, indeed, that he resists what must be a powerful political temptation to abandon it. Reporters who covered Bush in Texas had long noted his fondness for the book and his unvarying decision to read it in classroom photo-ops, but national reporters only discovered it in the preliminary stages of the presidential campaign, just as they were trying to settle on a single, consensus caricature of Bush for professional purposes. Was he a bloodthirsty death-penalty advocate or a born-again moralist? Party animal or feckless businessman? Yalie snob or ignorant dope? After some back-and-forthing, as we know, “ignorant dope” was agreed upon, and the candidate’s attachment, as an adult, to a picture book about a roly-poly insect served to reinforce the caricature. This came about in late 1999, when, for reasons that were never entirely clear, the Pizza Hut restaurant chain canvassed the nation’s 50 governors for the titles of their “favorite childhood books.” The request was ambiguous; it could have referred to books one read in childhood, or to books written to be read by (and to) children. Bush’s office offered up more titles than any other governor’s, with The Very Hungry Caterpillar at the tippy-top, followed by six others. The list was obviously an off-the-shelf concoction of the kind that a politician’s staff will use in responding to routine requests—Bush’s office had recently sent the same titles to the American Spectator, which had asked for a list of favorite books to give as holiday gifts. But it soon got into the papers that Bush’s “favorite book” ran to 150 words and involved a caterpillar. This was then amended to a form repeated by dozens of smarty-pants commentators, including the editorial page editor of the Miami Herald: “When asked in one interview to name his favorite childhood book, Bush cited The Very Hungry Caterpillar. That book, it turns out, was published when he was 23.” As a gag—a 23-year-old reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar! What a moron!—this is sub-Leno, sub-Bill Maher even, but not surprisingly it proved irresistible to Gail Collins, a columnist for the New York Times, who beat the poor joke to within an inch of its life, invoking it three times over a span of months. Others piled on, too, making the title a shorthand for the opinion all enlightened people hold of Bush. The snickering would have cowed a less formidable politician. The caterpillar would have been retired and The Little Engine That Could would have taken his place at schoolhouse events. But Bush soldiered on, clinging to the caterpillar as both candidate and president. He forces the obese little multiped on one classroom after another, and practically taunts anyone who would question his choice. “These kids are way beyond The Hungry Caterpillar,” he told reporters after one session with second-graders last month. “They read it better than the president could.” This is the setup for an insult so obvious that even I will refrain from making it—and a sign, on the president’s part, of either supreme self-possession or utter cluelessness. I know which I prefer to think it is. Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
