The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM. Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.
On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.” Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”
Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.
But the view from the future will likely be a different one. The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians. Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.”
A deep breath and a moment’s reflection are called for. If your bookie offers even money that fifty years from now Obama will be standing taller than Bush in the annals of America’s presidents, only a sucker would take that bet.
The smart players would go with Bush. The secret is that he enters the game with an edge:
1. We know what his log line is, and
2. His successes and failures have already happened.
At his first inauguration, Bush could not imagine that eight months later his presidency would be indelibly defined by a terrorist attack killing 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil.
But it was. And he responded.
Bush’s legacy is that after 9/11, even as bombs exploded and people died in terror attacks in London, Madrid, Istanbul and dozens of other cities around the globe, there were no further Al-Qaeda attacks in the United States.
Under President Bush, America recovered from a horrifying attack on its financial and political capitals and its air transportation system. And he did what was needed to keep the country safe. Obviously that is not the entire story of the Bush presidency, but in the end it may be seen as the only story.
Clare Boothe Luce sagely observed that a president’s legacy is but a single line. Abraham Lincoln? He freed the slaves. Ronald Reagan? He won the Cold War. Jimmy Carter? He attempted national suicide and failed.
Barack Obama? That will depend on whether he can match the post-9/11 record of President Bush in stopping terrorists before they kill Americans; or whether he continues on the path to a Carteresque debacle. His goals for radically upending the economy, politics and culture of our nation are bigger than Jimmy Carter’s were. His failure will be, too.
President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, as the Bush team before them, must confront the same axiom: those charged with stopping the terrorists must be successful every time, while the terrorists only need to be successful once.
Paradoxically, the one time when the MSM hatred of President Bush was momentarily suspended came in the weeks following Osama bin Laden’s murderous success in attacking Manhattan and Washington, a blow so close to the heart of the MSM that for a time many of its members felt panic as they looked out their windows and up at the sky and saw a passing plane.
But then a sense of security was restored in the country and then the reality of that security was proven over time. And once its fear subsided, the MSM washed its face, moussed its hair, put on a fresh shirt and went after Bush with a vengeance, directing special vitriol at the war on terror. We leave this for a future crop of graduate students in psychology to ponder.
In the meantime, interlopers promenade through the East Room and panty bombers light up in flight. President Barack Obama has served one-fourth of his term. The MSM has just perceptibly begun to doubt him, to weigh the efficacy and resolve he brings to his watch. But the mainstream media are yet to contemplate the unthinkable: Should Obama fail to prevent but one “man-made disaster” the Bush legacy will soar.
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