Out of Step, but With a Big Swagger
Americans love swagger. Or many do. It’s part of our collective character. Our entertainments, our fashions, our heroes and antiheroes draw from the common well. No matter how diverse and discordant we become, which is to say plenty these days, swagger is tradition shared.
It also explains one of the curiosities of American politics.
On paper, George W. Bush is out of step with America, in important places way out of step. But his gait is good. He gets away with it and prospers by swagger.
The country, for instance, has changed in 30 years. Polls show that strong majorities of citizens view themselves as conservationists. Science and common sense tell us there is little time to dally and no good reason to. Bush laughs in the face of this and pursues polluting, consumption policies more in tune with half a century ago. And he remains resiliently popular.
The greatest business scandal of the age swallows up the hopes of thousands of Americans and the trust of millions. Who was cozy with the top cats who brought Enron down? Back-slapping buddies, Texas oilmen in the cause; our president and vice president argue for still bigger tax breaks for the well-off and more wide-open freedom for business. They swagger on a cushion of public approval.
Democracy isn’t supposed to work this way, at least in the operator’s manual they give us in civics class. But politics isn’t purely mechanical, is it? Self-interest and shared values do not necessarily add up to a winner’s score. Far from it. Politics, like love, answers to the dizzy side of the cerebrum.
The man who did not earn the popular vote just 16 months ago now commands wartime loyalty. When citizens of other countries object to American highhandedness and call the president a cowboy, they are not entirely incorrect. They should have learned by now that vast numbers of Americans, including those lightly ballasted multitudes whose support floats up and down whimsically in the polls, tend to view the arena of foreign affairs as either someone else’s problem or the OK Corral.
Bush’s uncompromising approach to domestic affairs is much the same, and so far without contrary results.
An astonishing four out of five Americans disagree with the president on the big--let’s say, defining--issues of Social Security and tax cuts, according to the Los Angeles Times Poll. Even Republicans, by more than a two-thirds margin, would rather cancel the later stages of the president’s tax-rate reduction to preserve Social Security revenue.
By a margin of 50% to 30%, the nation believes environmental protection should outweigh economic growth. Nearly seven out of 10 Americans want to know the details of meetings between industry barons and administration officials to devise Bush’s energy plan.
Yet when asked directly whether Bush’s policies will move the country in the wrong direction, only 19% of the country said yes, according to a survey last month by the Gallup organization.
I am not an insider, so I don’t know how this is officially explained in Washington. From time to time, I hear the gloaters argue that it’s as simple as “you gotta stand for something” and people will back you, even if they are, poor things, disposed to stand for something else. In the marketing idiom of pollsters, we hear that Bush is a leader in the authoritarian Daddy mold, in contrast to the solicitous Mommy image of the Democrats, so shut up and eat your spinach. Perhaps. Or maybe these are just different ways of describing swagger.
The late Lee Atwater, the hard-boiled GOP consultant behind Bush’s father, taught me the important lesson that politics, contrary to what the nearsighted believe, isn’t local but cultural.
For a time in the late 1980s before his health failed, Atwater and I would escape the campaign trail to talk about books or take walks in the sunshine along the beach path in Venice. John Wayne and the Oakland Raiders displayed one kind of swagger, but Atwater identified it elsewhere, and almost everywhere, in Americana--in the Dust Bowl folk music of Woody Guthrie, in the ghetto novels of heroin junkie Donald Goines and in the poseurs at Muscle Beach.
Atwater never said as much to me, but I sensed his frustration with the elder Bush’s incapacity to shed his genteel skin and stride like he knew how in those hand-tooled cowboy boots. I am pretty sure that Atwater would have been proud of the old man’s son.
For all the day’s fury over issues and ideology, domestic politics sometimes is about the kick in your step rather than where you’re going.