Political Dog Days

Editor's Note: Scene friend and noted author John Egerton will share his views of the Bush administration's foreign affairs policy and the election in upcoming pieces. Below are his thoughts, recorded amid the blazing days of August, on the American economy that the Bush team has created.

Cynicism peaks in February, when it feels as if it has been winter since you were a child," wrote upstate New Yorker Barry Crimmins in his new book of political satire, Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal.

As he was struggling to survive the bitterly frigid season of 2002-03—and along with it, the throbbing cacophony of hysteria that set the stage for America's unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq—Crimmins reflected: "This is the perfect metaphorical winter. Like the court-appointed Bush administration, it is merciless and seemingly perpetual. Something worse always seems imminent."

The simile resonates with me. I have never experienced a rural New York winter, but thinking of the Bush regime as an endless and ever-worsening Arctic landscape strikes me as a perfect fit.

An equivalent seasonal ordeal in the Southern reaches of these United States is known as the dog days, a hot-coals phenomenon that rolls around almost every summer. Like Northern winters, the dog days can bring to mind endless torture—and they also lend themselves effectively to political metaphor.

In the South, August is the cruelest month. Most afternoons, the sky fades to a pallid off-white that swallows up shadows and ratchets the solar intensity to laser-beam level. Heat and humidity race for the triple digits like hot-rodders with the hammer down. The earth cracks open, but nothing leaks out except billows of dust and swarms of yellow jackets. Running water slows to a trickle, the flowers wilt and the once-glorious tomato crop is reduced to a pathetic handful of knobby green spheres no bigger than golf balls. Only the kudzu thrives, the better to conceal mosquitoes, horseflies, lurking copperheads.

It is in the torrid, sultry days of August, when it's too hot for a dog to scratch fleas, that Southerners pass through their crucible of endurance. They undergo a severe testing of body and soul. Their resolve weakens; hope and faith hang by the merest thread. And the most agonizing part of all is not the heat itself but the knowledge—the absolute certainty—that the worst is yet to come. It will still be 90 degrees in the shade on into this month of September, and perhaps beyond.

No wonder so many Southerners (particularly those old enough to remember the pre-air conditioning era) live in fear and loathing of eternal hell-fire. In a manner of speaking, we've been there.

This twilight zone of the spirit is seared indelibly upon the brain of every road-tested Southern politician facing serious opposition at the polls. If he (or she) has had four years, more or less, to lay out a program of leadership and service worthy of the people's trust, that amounts to a built-in advantage that should be sufficient to defeat all challengers. But if the incumbent has repeatedly made false pronouncements, and committed many grievous mistakes without acknowledgement or apology, and left the people worse off than they were before, those frenetic final weeks preceding a November election can seem like an eternity spent schlepping down the bleak highway to hell. Exposed politicians who have known first-hand both the dog days of August and the uphill climb to an election defeat will tell you that the pain of those two agonies is indistinguishable. "Merciless and seemingly perpetual" hardly does descriptive justice to either condition.

George W. Bush is in that zone right now. He is enough of a Southerner to know about the weather (though it's more precise to describe him as a sometime-west Texan who affects "the cowboy way" and sports a practiced down-home personality light years from his Northeastern upper-crust roots). He is also enough of a politician (if not yet an experienced loser) to know how far it is as the crow flies from one election to the next—and how immeasurably distant it can feel if the crow in question happens to be walking and carrying an empty gas can.

As a mounting wave of voters starts to figure him out, President Bush is looking more and more like a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that within any given subculture (corporations, for example, or the political arena), people tend to get promoted to the level of their incompetence. (For the record, I should note that Bush also lacked the qualifications to be governor of Texas, but got the job anyway—twice—and used it as a stepping-stone to the presidency.)

Since he moved into the White House in January 2001, Mr. Bush has developed an astonishing pattern of incapacity, inattention, mismanagement, partisanship, duplicity and hubris. Along the way, he has immodestly described himself as "a compassionate conservative," as "a uniter, not a divider," and most recently as "a war president" on a mission from God. Even as his disastrous domestic and foreign policies leave a spreading scene of desperation and havoc in their wake, Mr. Bush's image-makers flank him with busts of Lincoln and Churchill, seeking innocence by association. If there is anything more amazing than his self-evident shortcomings, it's the fact that a rock-solid 40 to 45 percent of the nation's registered voters continually approve of his performance in office.