The Invisible Bubble

Today George W. Bush gave the last press conference of his presidency, and it was a particularly painful one to watch. The joke about the press “misunderestimating” him fell flat, and even the President's small steps towards reflection were tempered by a rhetoric that was alternately passive (“I was told, “I was disappointed” ) and defensively aggressive, “I don't see how I can get back home in Texas and look in the mirror and be proud of what I see if I allowed the loud voices ...to prevent me from doing I thought was necessary to protect this country.”

The mistakes President Bush acknowledged were the same ones he's mentioned in the recent past: placing the Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier just as U.S. control of Iraq was unraveling and pursuing the privatization of social security instead of focusing on immigration reform. The Bush Administration has had few lucky breaks of late, but one could say that the social security “failure” was truly a blessing in disguise given the precipitous fall of the stock market in recent months.

Bush quickly recast other “mistakes” as “disappointments,” or even as “things that didn't go according to plan,” and there was a moment of inadvertent black humor when he stated that he was “disappointed” not to have found “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and I could only wonder a) did he really want Saddam Hussein or any other dictator to have such weapons? Or b) did he want them so that he could justify one of the most ill-advised, costly, and destabilizing wars in U.S. history?

Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to respond to this discovery with a feeling of relief that Iraq did not pose such a threat to the U.S. or its neighbors, and then secondly, to feel and express some remorse for making such a momentous and far-reaching decision to go to war on a false pretext?

Perhaps the most telling moment occurred when the President insisted that he did not “live in a bubble” and did not feel “isolated” during his Presidency. For a White House whose main information source was Fox News, and given Bush's repeated boasts that he did not pay attention to polls or even pay much attention to the press, it stretches the imagination to believe that this administration or this President really wanted to hear any voices but those that echoed their own beliefs and reinforced their often smug sense that their world view was the right one.

But I felt a real sense of poignancy to hear a man who has been leader of the most powerful nation in the world for eight years remain so sublimely ignorant of or oblivious to the deep anger that many on the left and the right feel about the actions of his administration and the effects on the way the American government - not the American people or American culture--but specifically this administration is perceived around the world.

“I don't why they get angry. I don't know why they get hostile,” he said dismissively. Bush is so invested in his image of himself as fighting “the Enemy” that he has no means of seeing the world in any terms but the starkest black and white.

"You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror,” President Bush said in a joint news conference with Jacques Chirac in November 2001, and while the world and the American public have grown weary of such dogmatic pronouncements, President Bush seems unable to shift from this single-minded view of the world.

Thus while reflecting on what he could have done better in his response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush could only think in terms of the grand gesture: “If I had taken Air Force One to New Orleans or Baton Rouge, law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission,” he protested, as if the citizens who suffered from the storm's aftermath were not more concerned about the long delays in receiving supplies, the inadequate evacuation plans, lack of replacement housing, and the actual failure of the city's levees.

Similarly Bush rejected outright any notion that the scandals of Gitmo and Abu Grahib had damaged America's “moral standing,” reducing the world's outrage at the photos and the reports of waterboarding to the voices of some malcontent “elites” in Europe.

So now George W. Bush goes back home to Texas, hoping that history will restore his reputation according to his simplified “good versus evil” narrative, and unaware that he is still living in a bubble--not one imposed by the isolation of the Presidency--but one he has created himself through his steadfast assertion that all of his actions have been taken in defense of the homeland and therefore are not open to question.

Bush claims that the so-called “burdens of office” are overstated because he perceives any form of introspection or self-examination as a form of self-pity, not recognizing that the most respected Presidents in our history, like Abraham Lincoln, became icons of Presidential greatness, not because they were once unpopular for making the “tough decisions,” but because they made those decisions, without a sense of absolute confidence, but rather with doubts, with regrets, and with a respect for and awareness of those who opposed them. No one living in a bubble will ever be able to make that claim.