Bush, the personal, and the political

President Bush has said over and over to anyone who would listen that the immigration bill was “personal for me.” What does this mean?

First, let us recall the incident about a year ago when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was attacked by Democrats for something (this was prior to the more recent scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys), and Bush said something like, “Alberto Gonzales is my friend, when people attack my friend I resent it.”

Now this was a wholly inappropriate comment for the president of the United States to make. Gonzales is an officer of the government. Bush’s personal relationship with him should be irrelevant to any public discussion of Gonzales’s conduct of his office. Yet Bush was clearly suggesting that Gonzales cannot be criticized, because he is Bush’s friend, whereas Bush would accept criticisms of other government officers who are not his friends. He was implying that for him personal loyalty and affection trump his duties as president, trump politics, even trump the national good.

And now we can understand what Bush means when he says that the amnesty is personal for him. He has told us over and over that he likes the Mexicans, that they are good, decent people, they are fine people, they are wonderful people. Clearly he loves them. They are, in other words, his friends. He wants to do well by his friends. Just as he’s done well by his friend Gonzales by making him White House counsel and Attorney General, he wants do well by his Mexican friends by legalizing millions of Mexican illegal aliens, opening the border to unlimited millions more legal Mexican immigrants, and merging the U.S. politically and culturally with Mexico. Bush resents any attack on his friends. He will not allow any attack on his friends. To disagree with amnesty is to attack Bush’s friends. Bush resents it, and he will not stand for it.

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M. Mason writes:

Your analysis has the ring of truth about it, and though some may think it trite to reduce the matter down to these basic human elements, the very simplicity of this explanation is another reason why it’s probably the most likely one. As I have observed the President’s actions over the years and read the accounts of others who’ve known him, he does not appear to be a complex or difficult person to understand. To state that “personal loyalty and affection trump his duties as president, trump politics, even trump the national good” and that “he resents any attack on his friends… and will not allow any attack on his friends” is to say that this is a man who is essentially driven by emotion and will, not by intellect. Once his affections latch onto someone or something then his loyalty quickly follows. From that point on, he will stubbornly resist any higher rational, factual and political arguments that expose how misplaced his loyalties are. Instead of welcoming intellectual engagement for correction he will dismiss it, be annoyed about any questioning of those loyalties and seek to vilify the offender.

LA replies:

Excellent commentary.

Of course my intention is not to reduce Bush’s motivations to this one motivation, but to understand this one motivation. The peril of a blog is that we tend to discuss only one aspect of an issue at a time, and then people wonder, what about these other aspects?

With Busheron and immigration, I see three main forces at work. Very briefly:

• the American liberal/neoconservative ideology of universal equal rights and the basic sameness of all humans;

• his personalistic, emotion-based style of evanglical Christianity (we’re all children of God, and that is more important than country), which perfectly complements the neocon universalism;

• his specific attachment to Mexicans.

Gintas writes:

There’s something about what you said about Bush that makes him a better fit as a swaggering generalissimo of some Central American banana republic.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 08, 2007 04:03 PM | Send