As George W. Bush has tanked in the polls, a question has gained prevalence on the op-ed pages and chat shows: Will the son repeat the mistakes of the father? By which is meant, of course, that Bush Senior went from a 90-something percent approval rating to losing his re-election bid -- will Junior do the same?
The analogy is apt, though, only up to that superficial point. Because the deeper story is, no, W. is not repeating the mistakes of his father. He's making an entirely new set of mistakes that are all his own.
Senior's mistakes were errors of competence and engagement. After the Berlin Wall fell, he came up with a niftily sound-bitey phrase (a "New World Order"). But he propounded only the vaguest idea of what that order would actually be. To show that he understood the plight of working people amid the dislocations of the then-emerging information economy, he actually gave a speech in which he sunk to the comical nadir of deconstructing his own text for his listeners, a postmodern first for the American presidency ("Message: I care"). And to demonstrate that he was jez' folks, he went to a Frederick, Md., mall to buy socks, where he wound up expressing amazement at a piece of cash-register technology that had surfaced years before.
If only those were W.'s mistakes. His, by contrast, are errors of zealotry -- of a belief system in which ideology overrides evidence in nearly every instance -- and are therefore a much bigger problem. They are also, to make the contrast with Poppy more stark, errors of overconfidence and too much engagement; where the dad was vague and bumbling, the son and the son's courtiers have been anything but. Give me vague and bumbling any day of the week.
Junior, like his father, also laid out a vision for the world, in his speech at West Point and in a National Security Strategy paper that was published in September 2002. There was absolutely nothing about these documents that was vague. Their vision of a preemptive and imperial America was specific, all right. It was also a vision that Poppy explicitly rejected. What we now know as the Bush doctrine was first floated in 1992, when Senior was still in office, in a paper called the Defense Planning Guidance, the drafting of which was overseen by many of the same men now calling the shots -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis Libby. When it was leaked to The New York Times in the spring of 1992, the Hobbesian vision it announced was quickly denounced by Senior. Junior embraced it.
Similarly on the domestic front, Senior saw the evidence of mounting deficits and made the responsible -- if politically unwise, at least as far as his base was concerned -- decision to seek a moderate tax increase. To Junior, though, evidence is something to be manipulated, spun or (usually) ignored. Ergo, the largest deficits in the country's history, and still the push for more and more tax cuts for the rich.
You can go virtually straight down the line on almost any issue: judgeships, for example, where Senior mixed his more ideologically hard-shell appointments (such as Clarence Thomas) with a reasonable number of moderates (such as David Souter). Or the environment, where Senior, while certainly pro-business, signed amendments to the federal Clean Air Act that carried some severe penalties for corporate polluters, announcing at a White House gathering in November 1990 that "polluters must pay. . . . There is a new breeze blowing, a new current of concern for the environment." The differences are profound enough that it's fair to say the two men have just two things in common: blood and tumbling poll numbers.
Finally, of course, the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame matter gets right to the heart of the vast moral acreage that separates father from son. In a now widely circulated quote, Bush Senior said, at a 1999 ceremony dedicating an intelligence center in his name, that those who reveal the names of America's undercover operatives are "the most insidious of traitors." But to Junior and Karl Rove, "the most insidious of traitors" are people who exercise their right to free speech by writing a newspaper column. When W. and Rove hear the word "traitor," they think not of their country. They think of their agenda. And anyone who doesn't go along with it is guilty of treason.
Senior shouldn't be deified in retrospect. But at least he had a patrician's appreciation of the notion that the institutions on which the country's vitality and continued strength depend -- Congress, the courts, the great universities -- need attention, respect and their own sort of independence to thrive. Junior and his henchmen see only friends and enemies. The independence of institutions, and the importance of allowing men like Joseph Wilson to have their say in debate, means nothing to them. It is, in fact, anathema to them, hence the perceived need to discredit him. Should the Wilson-Plame matter explode into something big, it will be precisely the scandal this secretive and ideology-obsessed administration deserves.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
