A NEW George W. Bush last Tuesday addressed a transformed country, wholly unlike the one he campaigned in, and as not quite the man who campaigned. Gone is the political dynamic of the past dozen years, gone the small presidency, gone the politics of minor entitlements, gone the burden of the social issues, gone the politics of splitting the difference between the fringe and the middle, of trying to graft a slice of the wary and unengaged center to an angry and overengaged base. The compassionate president is now the war leader; the man who once could not name the leader of Pakistan is wholly conversant with West Asian issues; the tormentor of language is frequently eloquent. He leads a country in which the political terrain has been utterly altered, with old constraints leveled, and new possibilities revealed. It is too early to tell what all these may lead to. But not to describe what they are. Bush has changed. Proclaimed president by the networks shortly after two in the morning of November 8, 2000; given the office on December 12, when the Supreme Court of the United States put an end to the attempts of the Supreme Court of Florida to give the great prize to his rival, Bush became commander in chief on September 11, 2001, and a landslide president three days later, when he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington in the morning, and at ground zero in New York that afternoon. Six days later came his big speech to Congress. No one since then has suggested he does not fill the screen. Years ago, so it seems, he called his campaign book “A Charge to Keep,” a phrase at the time that seemed windy and meaningless. Turns out he was serious. His rage at what was done on his watch to his country is open and raw. To all of his country. The defiant Texan now seems at home everywhere. Once ill at ease in blue parts of the country, he now loves New York, and vice versa. In the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland says he has settled “la question Bush,” or the matter of gravitas. David Broder compares him to Lincoln and Kennedy. “Not one of more than fifteen prominent Gore loyalists interviewed said their candidate would have done a better job,” reports Richard Berke in the New York Times. Bush, who squeaked into office by the most narrow of margins, is now strongly supported by almost 60 percent of the country, and has had the highest levels of sustained popularity for an American president since polling began. The office has changed. George H.W. Bush is said to have told Michael Beschloss that he could feel the air leave his office once the Cold War had ended. On September 11, it came rushing back. Gone is the Clintonian model of small, poll-driven issues. The presidency of school uniforms and wars on tobacco has been replaced by the presidency of Special Forces uniforms and shooting wars. Gone is a politics driven by a cluster of race-gender themes. Politically speaking, the 1990s began on September 10, 1991, with the opening of the hearings on the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the issues that emerged, and that poisoned that process, would dominate the decade ahead. Abortion. Sexual harassment. Identity politics. Gays, in and out of the military. Impeachment, that odd case of blowback, when the harassment traps laid by feminists to trip up their enemies tripped up Bill Clinton instead. The public thought little of most of these issues, and when it did, it tended to cling to the middle. But the momentum was seized by the social polarizers, who grabbed hold of each party’s base. As the public dozed off, their voices became ever louder. Activists representing minority views on non-voting issues were the only party loyalists left. Nomination fights swung on definitions of purity, on issues of abortion and race. Each base gave its party a firm floor of support and kept it competitive. But it also turned off and discouraged many swing voters, and put a ceiling on the growth of the parties. There were three successive presidential elections in which the winner failed to reach 50 percent in the popular vote, and three elections roiled by voter rebellions: In 1992 and ’96, the Reform party of H. Ross Perot carefully steered clear of all social issues, and in 2000 the cross-party favorite John McCain tried hard to do the same. The central political problem for presidential candidates of the last decade–how to convince your base that you are with them completely, while trying to reassure the rest of the country that you are not–proved too much for even the cleverest politicians, who swung back and forth between Sister Souljah moments and groveling, never quite managing the realignment that would boost one party above the other, and give it majority status. This strange, steamy reign of the race-gender issues lasted ten years and one day. It came to an end at 8:46 in the morning of September 11, when people’s minds were wrenched away from exotic diversions and focused on more basic things, such as matters of life and survival. The chasm that previously existed between the political extremes was not so much resolved as swamped, in a great tide of fellow feeling. Culture warriors took a triple hit on September 11: They lost visibility and access to media; their leaders said things that were stupid and petty; and their favorite tactic of divisive name-calling lost its rhetorical purchase. Few seemed to notice or care much that Giuliani and Bush, Ridge and Rumsfeld, Powell and Cheney, had conflicting views on abortion. Predictions of rot, from the left and the right, were proven mistaken. Afghan women were freed, not by National Organization for Women press releases, but by George W. Bush and his armed forces. For these reasons and others Michael Barone suggests that the “veto groups” of American politics have lost much of their power and salience. Bush has a saner political climate than before the strikes happened, a chance to build broad coalitions. It is an opportunity he has eagerly seized. The attacks gave Bush the greatest of political gifts: the chance to start over. In 1992, Bill Clinton planned to run as a New Democrat and thrilling outsider, able to attract many new people by running against his party’s establishment. Then Mario Cuomo withdrew from the race, and he was forced to run as the establishment, against candidates even stranger than he was. He repaired to his party’s unions and interest groups, and never left them. In 2000, Bush planned to run as a different kind of Republican and thrilling outsider, able to attract many new people by running against his party’s extremes. Then he was outflanked by John McCain, a temperamental outsider, and became the man running against the reformer, the handpicked candidate anointed by his party’s establishment. Bush survived, but as the candidate from Bob Jones University, not the best footing from which to court centrists. He too never regained his early luster. Until the attacks. September 11 gave Bush a second chance. Establishing himself as the national leader, he started to bond with those people put off by Bob Jonesness: urbanites, union members, soccer and basketball moms. Showing the multiple sides of his nature, he is running a war that is also compassionate. He has dropped bombs and foodstuffs, asked American children to raise money to help their Afghan counterparts, showed up at a soup kitchen to urge people to support charities overlooked in the rush to help the terrorists’ victims. He has promised New York money and sympathy, bonded with the workers who were the day’s heroes, pitched a perfect strike at Yankee Stadium. (Bush can “put together the old Reagan coalition,” said Peter King, the congressman from Long Island. “He really has connected to construction workers and cops and firemen. I hear it the sad way–at wakes.”) In a way, Bush is starting to replicate his accomplishment in Texas, where he occupied the broad middle and coopted his opponents. He is gaining hugely with independents, women, and moderates, the polls tell us. Groups once fiercely opposed now appear willing to give him a hearing. Many blacks seem to have dropped their reflexive hostility. His strong stance against terrorism gives him a platform from which to reach out to Jews. Bush has even been cheered in Manhattan. Realignment is surely not certain, but it is now possible. And that is not all that has changed. THE COUNTRY has changed. The country Bush ran in was both fat and ill-tempered, pessimistic, uncertain concerning its prospects and future. Then catastrophe struck, and it perked up remarkably. The towers burned and collapsed, the Pentagon smoldered, the stock market tanked, and the public felt better. Anthrax loomed, alerts continued, and it felt better still. “Even though the country was in worse shape after September 11 than before, people said they felt better,” wrote the columnist Robert Samuelson. “In a Sept. 7 to Sept. 10 Gallup poll, 55 percent of the respondents said they were ‘dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States,’ while only 43 percent were satisfied. By early December, 70 percent were satisfied, and only 28 percent dissatisfied.” This change in the country tracks the great change in Bush, who through part of last year seemed unfocused and drifting. Bush–and the country–had been tested too little and given too much, and seemed like children when measured alongside their parents, not least in the recent campaign. Bush’s father was a war hero at 18, a fighter pilot shot down in the Pacific Ocean. Bush flew on weekends, in the National Guard. Al Gore’s parents had fought their way up from the most dire poverty. Young Al had been raised as a prince. Bush conceded as much in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, when he assigned great wars and large deeds to his father’s cohort, and small acts of kindness to his own. The implication, the unspoken dread, was that small, kindly acts might be all we were still good for. Then, on September 11, the softest generation got the greatest sucker punch of all time. Nobody panicked. Nobody crumbled. Nobody fled. Americans everywhere became mad, and not frightened. Ordinary people behaved with astonishing valor. Ordinary people, who never had thought themselves heroes, brought down Flight 93. The culture held, and the market recovered. Rudy Giuliani emerged as the Winston S. Churchill of lower Manhattan. Bush did not put a foot wrong. If it is intoxicating to be shot at and missed, it is also intoxicating to be tested, and to do more than one ever imagined. It breeds exhilaration, and further self-confidence. Arguments will rage over how much Bush has changed. It is probably true that he, like the country, was tough underneath all along, but until now lacked the venue to show it. At 55, as he puts it, he has found his “mission and moment.” It shows. There is one great thing common to all of these changes that is itself critical: the movement from the small and special in the direction of the basic and big. There are no issues more basic than life and survival; nothing bigger than this round-the-world war. The presidency is back at the center of everything. Bush, says Peggy Noonan in her new book about Reagan, is set to have an old-fashioned, Trumanesque presidency. The old order was one of caretaker presidents, leading fragile majorities based on minuscule issues with limits imposed by interest-group power, and agendas driven from the fringes. In the reign of George II, all of this was supposed to be true, only more so, trapped as he was by minority status, and two parties at absolute parity. Instead, the world has turned upside down. Bush’s ratings are astral, even with Democrats; big issues are now driven from the center, and broad coalitions are within his reach. Given a new set of large, basic issues around which to forge deep emotional bonds with the public, Bush has his big chance to do what he wanted, and define and expand his own party. His moment may pass, and these thing may not happen. But we can say that he now has his shot. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
