Your ordinary average person can look pretty good at the podium when he has edited his speech 24 times and had three days to practice it in his own private theater before an audience of coaches and background experts.
That’s how President Bush looked on Tuesday night. Pretty good. He stumbled slightly after the Democratic side of the aisle stood and cheered when he said, “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security.” It did not appear to be a response he (or his speechwriters or advisors) foresaw. When the opposition cheering stopped, he appeared to lose composure. His voice lost its measured, even modulation, and he stumbled over a word in his next sentence. He wagged his finger (in anger?) at the Democratic side.
Then he called for a bipartisan Congressional committee to study Social Security solutions, a suggestion that all must applaude, and did. He settled down. For the rest of the night, he looked pretty good. Give the president a script, a couple of days to rehearse, and any response other than hostile, and he is going to look pretty good.
But events in this world are not scripted, or re-written 24 times, or available for two-day rehearsals. President Bush does not appear equipped to deal with that. His tortured responses even to impromptu questions from citizens (“Sir, have you seen ‘Brokeback Mountain?”) or media are painful to see. His responses to actual breaking events can be embarrassing. Two images stand out. He was sitting on a stool in a classroom, talking to schoolchildren, when an advisor appeared and whispered in his ear news about the planes hitting the WTC towers. He was obviously stunned, which was natural. But it was not natural, as the President of the United States, to let some minutes pass before he quit the stool. It suggested a frozen man, needing someone to tell him what to do.
The second image is of the president in Air Force One, looking out the window at the Katrina devastation, whose pitiful aftermath in New Orleans was already becoming known. The flyover done, he flew on to Washington. This was an image of a president being presented a once-in-a-lifetime leadership opportunity. If he had responded to it, had radioed the pilot: “Get this thing on the ground at Baton Rouge as fast as you can,” we would be living in a different country today. But he didn’t. He flew on. He came back a couple of days later, a short visit that will be long remembered specifically for eight words: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
It set up an aftermath in which his political opponents savaged him and his administration for their woeful response to a true national disaster. Worse, his political base became rattled by the Brownie quote and what it said about the president in whose trust they had placed their entire agenda. Then he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and his constituency was pushed into open rebellion.
All of these events in real time suggested the performance of a below-average person. Since the world is more a series of real-time events, than a succession of State of the Union speeches, the president’s performance Tuesday night left an impression of what it takes to make an average, or below-average president look pretty good. The rest of the time: don’t expect too much. Tuesday night, of his “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” the president said: “If there are people inside our country who are talking with Al Qaeda, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” No way, based on performances, could the real-time president accomplish that. He may as well go ahead and get the warrants. It will take two days, and it will make him look pretty good.
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