From comments yesterday:A story told by former House majority leader Dick Armey sums Bush up pretty well for me. It originally appeared in "The Rove Presidency," by Joshua Green, in September 2007's Atlantic Monthly. In the article, Armey said:For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it." Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued.
There was always something oddly absent in the public spirit of the Bush presidency. They understood the power of the office, but not its symbolism. In certain ways, this freed them. Part of their ability to so cynically use the office came because they harbored little vestigial awe at what it meant. They never signed the visitor cards, in reality or in metaphor, and so they never thought about preserving the image of the presidency for future generations of schoolchildren. That's liberating if, for instance, you want to use the powers of the office to torture and enrich your buddies and reward your loyalists. It erases that pesky twinge of guilt. But it also imposes a poverty of imagination. It means, after 9/11, that you use the presidency's media power to suggest people go shopping because it's good for the economy, and you use its political power to start two wars, but you never use its symbolic power to bring people together and try and transform the grief and rage of the moment into something more noble. George W. Bush will, I think, be remembered as very ambitious politician. But I don't believe he'll be remembered as a very ambitious president.
