Bush: parrot or true believer?

Regarding my post on the presidential debate last night, Paul Gottfried writes:

I agree with you about W’s appalling lack of intellectual energy and about the many ways it showed in yesterday’s performance. E.g., Bush could have torn apart Kerry when K started yapping about the lack of military supplies in Iraq by reminding him about his vote against authorizing funds for such purposes. Unfortunately Kerry came off looking better than the incumbent, unless one knows his record in the Senate, by assuming the pose of a Burkean or Aristotelian statesman appealing to prudence and “judgment.” Bush, by contrast, sounded like a neocon broken record that no one in the room had bothered to turn off. Moreover, Bush is more intellectually offensive than Perle and Wolfowitz, who at least have thought out their positions for themselves. Bush simply parrots what his handlers tell him to say.

My reply:

The argument that Bush is parroting his handlers cancels itself out. Since his handlers are, by definition, much smarter than he, if he were parroting them, then obviously his parrotings would be a lot more intelligent and varied instead of the same couple of dumb phrases over and over.

In general, I think it’s a mistake to interpret people exclusively in terms of “influences.” When we see people that way, we never see them whole, as active agents in their own existence. Bush is the president. He has through his life and career acquired the beliefs that he believes in, just as any other person acquires the beliefs that he believes in. His thing about democracy as the cure-all for everything from terrorism to the common cold is not just something planted in him by others, it’s what he believes. He is, in fact, a true believer.

But, having said that, a couple of days later I had a second thought:

Paul,

You said Bush was a puppet of his neocon advisors. I said, if he was a puppet of these smart people, wouldn’t he be saying smarter things than just the same simplistic slogan over and over and over?

But now it occurs to me: why should I assume that his advisors’ arguments are any more intelligent and complex than his own? After all, it was the leading neocons, starting with Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, who initiated this mindless ideology that since all people in the world love their children and don’t want a knock on the door in the middle of the night, therefore all people are ready for democracy, and, furthermore, we don’t even have to consider any criticisms of this idea because anyone who doubts it is motivated by resentment. Now, given that the brilliant neocons have been mouthing such mindless slogans, it becomes plausible after all that Bush, in endlessly repeating his brainless, non-responsive slogans in the debate (“It’s tough work, democracy is hard,” is indeed their puppet.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 01, 2004 01:41 PM | Send