The Case for Bush
He trusts the people. And they can trust him
Peggy Noonan
A change is in order. In the past eight years the American people
have built and fueled a miracle: the greatest economic engine in
the history of the world. Income up, standard of living up,
investment up. The deficit has become a surplus. We are fat and
almost happy. Once Rabbit was rich; now Rabbit is rolling, with a
Rolex, with a Beemer and a Benz.
It happened once before in our time: the years 1983 to 1989
marked the greatest peacetime economic expansion to that point in
all of U.S. history. President Reagan took steps that encouraged
growth, and while the American people produced it, he directed
the rollback of communism, the fall of the Wall. By the end, an
amazing thing: a more just and peaceful world, with America known
not as a bully but as a friend to freedom in the world.
What have Clinton-Gore done in eight years? Have they inspired
us, made us proud, done the brave, tough things that needed
doing, shown commitment and vision?
Sadly, no. They've dithered and ducked, coasted and claimed. They
squandered their opportunities to create a coherent American
agenda in the world. They failed to make us safer from nuclear,
chemical or biological attack. Domestically their attitude came
down to this: Reform the entitlements? We'd rather go to a fund
raiser. Bring new life to dead schools? Rather go to Hollywood.
Our children are poisoned by a sour, searing culture? Let them
eat something else. Let them eat cake. Clinton and Gore have been
unserious in their stewardship. What most characterized their two
terms was summed up by the Vice President in famous words: "No
controlling legal authority."
The scandals have been as humiliating for our great republic as
they have been historic in scope and size. Filegate, Travelgate,
hidden e-mails, lying under oath, hell to pay, abuse of the FBI,
of the personnel system; a health-care task force that violated
federal law; grand juries, billing records; Lincoln bedroom,
troopers, bimbos, coffees, lies. Most terribly, foreign agents
carrying cash meet with our President in the Oval Office; they
stand in their shiny shoes on the great seal of the United States
and later receive what they want: military technology. As a
result, China now has weaponry that one day, perhaps, may be used
against your children and mine. If there were a word in English
that stood for "the shame we feel for others who should feel
shame and don't," that word would be their legacy, the big vivid
thing that they gave us.
A change is in order. We have Gore, whose victory would represent
an endorsement of the Clintonian ethos. And we have Bush, who
asks, "Where's the wisdom in America? I believe it's with the
people. I trust the people." Those are the simple words of a
common man who has been lucky in life--who made the most of his
chances, made his mistakes, corrected them, became serious, began
to love God, came to trust him. The trust spread within him and
became a habit; in time it gave shape to his policies.
George Bush is a compassionate conservative. He sees the needs
other, older conservatives did not always see, or did not always
think they must or could address. But he applies conservative
solutions to these needs: more freedom, more choice, the
inclusion in the public sphere of faith-based approaches. All the
money in the world, he knows, cannot and will not turn around a
troubled child's heart. But God can, and his workers are eager.
Bush does not fear faith as an opposing power center to the
state. He likes it as an opposing power center to the state.
After all, faith freed Poland; perhaps it can free a tough
16-year-old in inner-city Detroit too.
Bush is sunny, ingenuous; he assumes good faith. His assumption
of good feeling has a way of spreading it. That has been his
history, in Texas, and in baseball, and in business. Gore, on the
other hand, is a rather strange individual. He has seemed in the
campaign like a rapper on MTV, all strut and no strength. He
cannot summon the courage to break with his patrons (the unions,
the White House) but is aggressive and cutting in the pursuit of
power; he will divide to conquer. He is a sophisticated man, and
yet he speaks the language of yesterday's class warfare. He seems
at times like an illustration of the idea that some modern men
have become, in the great age of feminism, confused about what it
is to be a man. The more he huffs and puffs and tries to dominate
the less manly he seems. Powerful men don't deride and
intimidate; they speak the truth and lead. They don't lie.
There is no nice way to say this: we can't afford another famous
liar in the White House. America is a strong country, but it may
not be able to sustain another fabulist; one can be called an
accident, a trick of history, but two would amount to a culture
of governance, a way of being. It is by institutionalizing the
acceptability of lies that a great power becomes a punch line.
"Don't change horses in midstream," Mario Cuomo tells us. But
Clinton and Gore were not the horse that brought us across the
stream--the American people made the great economic current that
pushed Clinton and Gore safely to shore. And now the latter brag
at how they used the spurs and whip.
A change is in order: the stream has been crossed, the horse
should buck, throw off the old and get a new rider, one worthy of
it. Of us. That man in this race would be Bush, the gentleman
from Texas.
-PICT-
CHRISTOPHER MORRIS--BLACK STAR FOR TIME
The sunny warrior of Texas has a way of spreading good faith
-ENCH- AS
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