The first "debate" -- with the restrictive ground rules negotiated by both campaigns, it seems fair to use the scare quotes -- really brought out Bush's lack of curiosity and intelligence last night. He was relentless in pushing his grab bag of stock phrases: He said "We won't achieve if we send mixed signals" several times, and repeatedly used the phrase "sending messages" -- as if the foundation of all policy is how it is perceived, not how it responds to reality.
More illuminating than Bush's pauses and grammatical incoherence, which some score as a strong point, was his impatience and testiness. He sighed, rolled his eyes, and made a number of petulant responses. (Kerry: "Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Ladin attacked us." Bush: "First of all, of course I know Osama bin Ladin attacked us. I know that.") At one point, with plenty of time left on his clock, he raised his hand and said to moderator Jim Lehrer "Let me finish." It was an odd echo of his 2000 debate with John McCain, where he repeated the phrase several times with growing, and obvious, anger.
The evening put Bush in a situation that is no doubt very unfamiliar to him: He had to directly face an opponent who strongly disagrees with him. Seeing his irritability, his childish petulance, and his insistence on sticking to a preformed system of simplistic slogans, reminded me of the dry drunk hypothesis of Bush's character: as a former addict, Bush sticks to a Manichean, melodramatic worldview, guided and shaped by canned rhetoric.
It also carries resonances of Hannah Arendt's take on Adolf Eichmann's moral vacuity, in terms of his inability to grasp reality without his comforting stock phrases at hand. Bush insulates himself from the world with poll-tested cliches, and mistakes the consistency of repetition for the solidity of principle: "We never change our beliefs, the strategic beliefs that are necessary to protect this country in the world." By substituting cliche for judgment, Bush turns his core convictions into his entire ethical outlook -- which ignores the crucial fact that moral decisions depend upon subtle and specific responses to particular situations.
Posted by Chris at October 1, 2004 07:21 AM