Sunday, July 13, 2003
(3:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Perchance to dream
The growing scandal over the Bush team's assertions that later turned out to have been false and may or may not have been known to have been false at the time they were uttered (in English: lies) has given me some hope that George W. Bush may turn out to be a one-term president. It's still far from clear, but I think that "forceful leadership" is starting to look like "dogmatic idiocy" to a lot of people.
Here's my interpretation of the Bush presidency so far. The general theme is to make grandiose assertions and hope that the facts eventually catch up. Thus, Bush declared victory early in one of the closest elections in history and never, ever backed down. It wasn't that he "wanted it more" than Gore or something, but that he believed he already had it, as if by right. If I were in Gore's position, I can see myself being shocked by such behavior, and most normal human beings in an uncertain situation would not make a similarly absolute counterclaim. Thus Gore looks like a wimp, and Bush looks like a strong, confident leader. The thing to remember, though, is that if Bush had turned out to lose the election in some clear way, he would have looked like an utter moron (I won't go into the casuistry of whether or not Bush won the election -- he's a legitimate president, but just barely). That has basically been the pattern the entire time: acting in faith that the war with Iraq would retroactively justify itself, Bush declares a trillion reasons for it, several of which turn out to be false (and some were even reasonably close to being known to have been false at the time). He hoped the evidence would catch up with his statements -- after all, that's how it's worked with the rest of his presidency.
We should not be surprised that such a man would run up huge budget deficits. He's been borrowing heavily against the future for quite some time now, and at this point, the stakes are very, very high. And as I'm sure we know from high school math, things start to get pretty shaky once you need a lot of relatively improbable things to happen in a series. Let's say there was a 50% chance that Bush won the election outright and Gore would be exposed as a whiny little bitch: maybe making the wager in that case was somewhat reasonable. But then let's say there's a 50% chance that we can bring order to Afghanistan, a 50% chance that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, a 50% chance that the world will come to its senses once the war is over, a 50% chance that the number of true "gambling" statements about Iraq will significantly outnumber the "gambling" statements that turn out to be false, a 50% chance that the economy recovers, a 50% chance that economists will somehow determine that massive tax cuts for the rich will help the economy, a 50% chance that the money for a new prescription drug benefit will fall out of the sky -- by the time you get done, if you need all of those things to happen, your odds stand at 0.78125%, by my math (and the figure of 50% is very, very optimistic on many of those items). By my calculations, the Bush administration has made a wager of at least the magnitude I have described, and the final reckoning might come a lot sooner than they thought it would.
They might make it through the next election, but their luck will run out at some point, and if there's any justice in this world, we'll end up with our third presidential impeachment trial within the next three years. Clinton was very popular when he was impeached for much less serious offense, so I don't think that Bush's popularity can provide a shield indefinitely. In fact, it's looking like Bush doesn't even need a particularly aggressive opposition movement -- his behavior is so brazen that he might just self-destruct on his own, even with perhaps the most spineless opposition party and the most supportive media culture that any president has ever enjoyed.
And so: let us pray....
