Frank Rich: The old Bush magic isn't working (Wow)

[deminks]

The New York Times

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2005
NEW YORK Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in U.S. history proved perfect for exposing this president, because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

http://iht.nytimes.com/protected/articles/2005/09/18/opinion/edrich.php

[Shoeempress]

1. Damn good article. Thanks for posting.

[ewagner]

2. That's some article

behind all the damning rhetoric about Bush*, there's a stern admonition for Democrats:

Come up with an alternative dammit!

Take the lead!

Seize the moment!

Is there risk in doing this? Yes, of course.

Is there a reward? Yes, most definitely.

Whoever steps forward as a leader on the Democratic side of the ledger will most likely become the favorite son at the Democratic Nominating Convention in '08.

That's the reward .....

[rateyes]

6. The first one I heard making the right criticisms,

and showing real leadership was Al Gore.

[I Have A Dream]

3. Great article. Recommended. n/t

[democrank]

4. Deminks, thanks so much.

This is the best article I`ve seen yet on the shallow, corrupt, criminal Bush administration. May they rot in hell.

[libodem]

5. reign of terror

scare everyone to death with orange alerts, keep the masses terrified and swear democrats can't get anyone through a crisis...land on an aircraft carrier for a photo-op and declare the war is won...all smoke and mirrors...when will they see the truth behind the snake-oil.....what a sham..what a shame..Michael Mooore is correct....

[TerdlowSmedley]

7. I like Frank Rich as a political columnist much better than I

ever did as a theatre critic.

[Captain Hilts]

14. EVERYBODY hated him as a theatre critic.

He hated everything. So much so that play producers sought out their own reviewers for print advertising. I remember that "A Few Good Men," which he had trashed had an endorsement from Katharine Hepburn.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

8. I certainly hope...

...Katrina has the lasting damage impact on Bushco that it's clearly going to have on New Orleans. I worry that MSM will be guided by their corporate keepers to slowly rehabilitate W's image and even paint him as the compassionate cowboy on a white horse as the rebuilding process moves forward. Here's a link to the same piece for those who don't subscribe/register with the NYT:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0918-23.htm

[hardrainfallin]

9. I especially liked this part

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.

This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.

Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.

[hardrainfallin]

10. Summing up...the conclusion wasn't bad either

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.

What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

[WiseButAngrySara]

11. K and R...Excellent article. Thanks so much for posting! n/t

[applegrove]

12. Ironic that the Wizard of Oz was written as a parable about the wealty,

politicians, & the gold standard that kept the economy from the people and in the hands of a few elites.

[Paradise]

13. kick! n/t

[Laelth]

15. Take a look at this paragraph:

It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Looks like the media might finally realize that their ratings will improve and they'll make more money if they show Americans the truth, as opposed to shilling for shrub. That's a very good sign.

-Laelth