Apparently, George W. Bush is growing in office. Two years ago, we were told he was a man without a brain, a frat house party boy, blithely unaware of the differences between Slovenia and Slovakia.
Now, following revelations that the White House and FBI had information about possible terror attacks before 9/11, Bush is portrayed as an all-knowing yet secretive schemer, surrounded by political wise men. In a matter of months, the media and his critics have transformed Bush from The Candidate to The Man Who Knew Too Much.
“What Bush Knew,” to cite Newsweek’s incendiary headline, is a story whose 15 minutes are nearly up. That’s because, after taking a deep breath, no sentient adult actually believes that Bush or his advisors knew about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, much less deliberately kept mum about it.
But the story is deeply revealing for other reasons, particularly what it tells us about the current temperature of the party out of power.
Faster than you can say “Oliver Stone,” Democrats shifted into scandal mode the moment word leaked that the FBI had warnings about al-Queda plots and suspicious pilot training last summer. “What did the president know?” Dick Gephardt intoned, invoking America’s most famous code words for cover-up. Sen. Hillary Clinton, no stranger to political pot stirring, rushed to the chamber floor wielding a copy of the New York Post’s front page with the headline “Bush Knew.” California’s Barbara Boxer, showing a slightly greater degree of restraint, simply raised the specter that federal agencies “knew something” and that the public needed to know too.
The full extent of FBI and CIA pre-9/11 intelligence failure will take some time to unravel. It is shameful, but it is hardly a revelation. It is the single obvious lesson of the September assault.
But for the political left-of-center that has stared hopelessly at Bush’s unmovable approval ratings for eight months, the latest Washington tempest about FBI memos and national security briefings was an opportunity it could not resist.
For months, the Democratic leadership and its allies in the press have been trying desperately to find a chink in Bush’s armor. In January, the story was that his irresponsible tax cuts caused the budget deficit. Then it was Enron. Then it was Tom Ridge refusing to testify before Congress. Then it was the fact that Republicans were offering a Sept. 11 photo of the president to high-level donors. With no apparent irony or embarrassment, former Lincoln Bedroom vendor and Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McCauliffe called it “disgusting.”
None of these ploys worked. Nor will Bush’s alleged failure to “connect the dots.” The result is an increasingly frustrated opposition that is becoming cranky, shrill and lurching to the left.
The signs are plentiful. Al Gore—the man who allegedly beat George W. Bush—is now treated with derision by many party insiders. In the Senate, Hillary Clinton and her colleague, Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs socialist, have taken on a new prominence. Cynthia McKinney, the congresswoman who was blaming Bush for 9/11 before news of FBI memos, continues to rant with impunity. Here in Tennessee, Democratic congressional candidate Jim Cooper, a pro-choice moderate with reformist credentials, was criticized by a Scene columnist as “right wing.”
A similar trend can be seen among the reliably liberal national columnists. Frank Rich, Molly Ivins and Maureen Dowd have hated Bush from the start. But in recent weeks they have taken on the hysterical tones more befitting conspiracy theorist Michael Moore. Meanwhile, on college campuses, always home to the Democratic base, Noam Chomsky’s paranoid musings on why the U.S got what it deserved on Sept. 11 is a best-seller.
This apparent rejuvenation of crackpot liberalism needs to be contrasted with the fate of the conservative fringe. Since the last election, and certainly since 9/11, Buchanan, Robertson, Falwell & Co. have been sent back to the fever swamps. True, Bush is running a very conservative administration, but the culture of his politics is largely free of the wacko factor creeping back into Democratic and progressive politics.
After losing a presidential election, the out-of-power party usually spends some time in the wilderness. Sept. 11 has only extended that period of isolation for the Democrats. With no strategy of their own, congressional leaders Tom Daschle and Gephardt have let the party drift. Even Sen. Joe Lieberman, the man most likely to have become the administration’s cool-headed critic, now seems to be drinking the caucus room Kool Aid. Last week, his investigation of Enron’s bankruptcy and energy market malfeasance took a conspiratorial turn when he suddenly subpoenaed all White House documents with references to Enron. What did he find? Evidence that Ken Lay had been invited to last year’s White House Easter Egg Roll. Ah ha!
Despite Bush’s abnormally high popularity, there are principled arguments one could make against the administration. The president hypocritically signed a protectionist steel tariff on imports. He is sending mixed signals about his intentions on Iraq. He hasn’t cleaned house at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. His welfare reform bill will demand more state spending just when most of them are broke.
These criticisms would require Bush to move ever so slightly to the right. That lesson seems lost on today’s angry Bush haters who seem persuaded that somewhere there is a scandal, a revelation, a smoking gun that will be their salvation.
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