Behind Bush’s Malaprops Is . . . Nothing : The President: He can’t speak straight because he doesn’t know what he wants to say.

By the end of President Reagan’s first term, friend and foe alike had begun to use the term “Reaganism” to refer to his governing ideology. But no one uses the word “Bushism” to mean any coherent set of political beliefs. A Bushism has come to mean the President’s funny way of talking. The staccato sentences with no pronouns. The long, meandering non-sentences that reverse course or get lost halfway through. The fractured syntax. The weird mixed metaphors and nonsequiturs.

Bush’s rambling, semicoherent style has been compared to Eisenhower’s, famously captured in a parody of Ike delivering the Gettysburg Address: “I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup here in this country . . .” that and so on.

The positive spin on Bushism is different. It’s that his inarticulateness illustrates his sincerity and lack of artifice. It shows that he’s a regular guy. Bush himself advanced this theory in his most eloquent performance: his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention. The author was Peggy Noonan, official purveyor of soaring lyricism to Republican presidents.

In one of that speech’s most absurd flights of Noonanism, Bush read from his Teleprompter: “Now I may be--may not be the most eloquent, but I learned that early on the eloquence won’t draw oil from the ground. . . . And I’m a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don’t. . . .”

In fact, no one has ever accused Bush of being a “quiet man.” He’s a babbler. And some of his most insincere babbling comes when he wants to be demotic. (“When I need a little free advice about Saddam Hussein, I turn to country music.”) The best case for Bushspeak as an expression of the democratic impulse is different. It was made by Jacob Weisberg of the New Republic, who compared Bush to “a big, clumsy golden retriever, drooling and knocking over furniture in his eagerness” to please everyone.

The canniest description of Bushism is by Timothy Noah of the Wall Street Journal, who compares it to call-waiting: Bush is always putting one half-finished thought on hold to take up the next one. Closely related is the tendency described by Meg Greenfield in Newsweek: “Bush is always telling you how to look at what he is doing, or what the impression is he is trying to create.” (“We have--I have--want to be positioned in that I could not possibly support David Duke, because of the racism and because of the bigotry and all of this.”) What these tics share is a clear view of the mind at work. Bush’s mental processes lie close to the surface.

This is honesty of a sort. Bush is famous for his attitude that politics is something one stoops to when necessary. When he denies a remark that he has just made (“People understand that Congress bears a greater responsibility for this--but I’m not trying to assign blame”), he is telegraphing that he doesn’t really mean what he says, that it’s all just politics. The implication is that as long as we’re all in on the joke, it doesn’t matter. (“I’ve told you I don’t live and die by the polls. Thus I will refrain from pointing out that we’re not doing too bad in those polls.”)

Bush’s problem is not a lack of intelligence--or an excess of the prescription tranquilizer Halcion. At bottom, his problem is a simple lack of anything to say. That’s why he babbles. That’s why he contradicts himself. That’s why he tells you how you should perceive what he’s saying, instead of just saying it. That’s why he tells transparent whoppers.

A man anchored in true beliefs not only would be more articulate in expressing those beliefs. He would make a better liar, too. He wouldn’t wreck a story about how faith sustained him while he waited to be rescued from the sea during World War II by adding, preposterously, that he was also sustained by thoughts of “the separation of church and state.”

If there were a real Bushism, in other words, there might not be all those Bushisms. Is that clear at all?