Bush Has a Lot More Than His Manhood to Prove in Race for Presidency

George Bush may be the most dangerous man in America. Democratic Presidents are liable to displays of toughness to fend off the right-wing charge that they are “soft”; everything in Bush’s public life proclaims that he would be similarly inclined--but for psychological, not political, reasons. Bush has something to prove. A man does not get called “the Cliff Barnes of American politics: blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once,” or a “wimp,” or a “gentleman twit,” or a “lapdog,” to cite just a few epithets that have been heaped on Bush over the last seven years, without conceiving a substantial desire to show the world that it just ain’t so.

Already in 1980, long before Doonesbury had consigned Bush’s manhood to a blind trust, he was talking tougher than any American political figure since Curtis LeMay. Here is an exchange printed in this newspaper in 1980, the last time that Bush was running for President. The interviewer was Robert Scheer, national correspondent for The Times:

Question: Don’t you reach a point with these strategic weapons where we can wipe each other out so many times . . . that it doesn’t really matter whether we’re 10% or 2% lower or higher (than the Soviets)?

Answer: Yes, if you believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange . . . . I don’t believe that.

Q: How do you win a nuclear exchange?

A: You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That’s the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets’ planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange.

Q: Do you mean 5% would survive? 2%?

A: More than that. If everybody fired everything he had, you’d have more than that survive.

To be sure, by the time the Scheer piece appeared, Bush had suffered his share of humiliations, and thus had developed a corresponding need to display his nuclear chest hairs. Hadn’t he lost two Senate races in Texas? Hadn’t Henry Kissinger been arranging Richard Nixon’s breakthrough mission to Beijing at the very moment that Bush, as the U.N. ambassador, was calling the United Nations’ recognition of Red China a “day of infamy”?

As it happened, the Scheer interview appeared weeks before Bush suffered the humiliation that sank his presidential hopes for that year--the night that he froze in a debate with Ronald Reagan in Nashua, N.H., on the eve of that state’s all-important primary. “What can I say?” a close adviser to Bush said of his performance in Nashua. “He choked up.” At the Republican National Convention later that year Reagan himself, chary of naming Bush as his vice president, looked back on the Nashua incident with a prescience that the years have done nothing to dim. “If he can’t stand up to that kind of pressure,” he remarked to an intimate, “how can he stand up to the pressure of being President?”

Still, it has gotten much worse for Bush since he has been in office. Reporters don’t like him because, as Morton Kondracke explained in the New Republic, “Bush is perceived to be a phony--a weak man posing as a strong.” That this perception thrives despite Bush’s heroic war record is testimony to the shamelessness with which he has become Ronald Reagan’s cheerleader: “I’m for Mr. Reagan, blindly,” he has said, and he has been as good, or as bad, as his word.

Bush is said to have strong support in the Republican Party’s Establishment, but he’s not the man for the conservative wing. His late conversion to its views strikes its members as pandering. And Bush’s smarmy condescension toward Geraldine Ferraro in their 1984 vice presidential debate should have earned him the lasting enmity of millions of women.

Bush’s real constituency, if one can be forgiven a cruel surmise, may be found among the nation’s comedians. It takes little imagination to predict what they’d do with a President Bush, with his Howdy Doody gestures, prissy voice and preppy manner. “Would I be a good President?” he asked in 1980. “I’d be crackerjack!”

But will Bush make it to the top of the greasy pole? For all the luster of what he calls his “marvelous credentials,” it’s hard to imagine. Television is just too pitiless to Bush. The pressure, as Reagan saw in 1980, gets to him and he starts talking the most amazing flapdoodle. Here is a specimen from a Bush appearance on “Meet the Press” in 1984. The subject was the admittedly tricky one of religion and politics:

“I think in politics there are certain moral values. I’m one who--we believe strongly in separation of church and state, but when you get into some questions, there are some moral overtones. Murder, that kind of thing, and I feel a little, I will say, uncomfortable with the elevation of the religion thing--not that I don’t feel strongly, I’ve been blessed by faith, my own family and a family that’s been very close and all of that . . . .”

Bush’s verbal style, given as it is to equivocations within qualifications, is not just syntactical slovenliness. It’s the mark of a man who, in the words of his former speech-writer, Christopher Buckley, “lacks steel.”

Bush is already implicated in the merely lunatic aspects of the Iran affair, and the shoots of suspicion linking him to its illegal aspects may bloom any day now in embarrassing headlines.

Thus Bush has two heavy burdens to carry: the Iran- contra scandal, in which he appears so far as a passive witness to disaster who lacked either the wits or the guts to challenge the President’s judgment, and his weakness as a convincing televisual candidate.

In view of these severe disadvantages, it seems a safe prediction that we will be spared the risk of having as President a man who might feel compelled to verify his virility through violent use of the awful power of the office.