Jack Kevorkian was released from prison last Friday, presumably
recruited to put the Bush administration out of its misery. The
same day, the White House meltdown continued with the departure of
long-time aide and spokesman, Dan Bartlett, whose familiar
quotations will be missed. The budding blossoms of spring have done
little to warm the winter of Bushian discontent.
And on that selfsame day, Ms. Peggy Noonan penned a woeful plaint at Opinion
Journal bewailing the damage inflicted by the sitting President
upon the Republican base. She uses the word “sunder” three times in
the body of the text and her editors add a bonus fourth in the
subtitle. I have occasionally been a griper myself, though not a
mourning Noonanite. But disaffected Republicans everywhere are
spewing: Bush is getting acid on base more than Al Kaline.
Is there no chance of lightening the sundering? Has Curious
George (so dubbed on a memorable TAS cover) given up the
fight and become The Man in the Yellow Hat?
One thing is clear. Victories have been hard to come by. His
last triumphant moment, it seems, came post-election in November
2004 when he started counting his political capital in public at a
press conference, instead of muffling like Midas. Since then he has
watched it dwindle like a bad investment. Well, at least there were
two generous dividend payments in the person of Justices Roberts
and Alito. What he lacks — psychologically and politically — are
signposts of genuine achievement.
Clinton was in much the same boat, wearing the same cap size, at
this point in his tenure, if for other reasons. He handled it
fairly well by setting mere survival as the goal, figuring if he
lasted to the end he could always pad his resume afterward as he
had padded it beforehand. He wisely, if cynically, told himself:
“You made your bed, now lie about it.” It worked. He gets
everything he ever wanted: the money, the girls, the phoney-baloney
philanthropist aura and the left-wing gaggle of revisionist
historians working overtime.
Yet even Clinton was not immune to the most pernicious
second-term syndrome of all: the miraculous policy coup that will
leave history gasping. Do the one big thing and they will forget
all the botched small things. In Bill’s case, he thought his
bedroom eyes could hypnotize Arafat into buying a life supply of
Israel Bonds. Instead Yassir said “No, sir,” and Bill was back to
gulping down Whoppers and telling whoppers about golf scores.
George W. seems to have lighted on immigration as his salvation.
If only his people could engineer a sweeping fix of our flawed
citizenship procedures, he would be the hero of the teeming refuse
team as the wretched shore up his support. The downtrodden would
stand up for him. The partisan swords would be beaten down and the
newly imported (or oldly imported and newly legitimized) cheap
labor would beat a path to pick up our ploughshares.
I have a simple suggestion, once the mirage fades. It is
admittedly cribbed from the Talmud, which requires an unemployed
man to be available to have sex with his wife every night if she
wishes. Though presented as an obligation, I figure this for a good
strategy to save the marriage. If he can’t pay his way as a
breadwinner, he can make her feel good in other ways.
Instead of fantasizing about chimerical landmark legislation,
just make a project out of cheering people up. Travel to
communities and hand out achievement awards — to educators,
firefighters, law enforcement, individual heroes. Let us see a big
award for the lady in Atlanta who talked the killer who held her
hostage into giving up. And one for the kidnapped girl in
Philadelphia who chewed through the duct tape and escaped out the
basement window. And the Florida kid who similarly got away from an
abductor earlier this year.
Don’t be defeated by Homnick’s Law of Two-term Presidents: “Four
years looking for sealegs, four years looking for a legacy.”
