9/14/00 1:55 p.m.
Dyslexic? Hogwash.
Sheehy's buncombe.

By Kate O'Beirne is NR's Washington editor.

ail Sheehy's profile of George W. Bush — "The Accidental Candidate," in the current issue of Vanity Fair — reaches the loony conclusion that Bush probably suffers from both dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. If I were inclined to engage in Sheehy's signature style of distant diagnosis, I would conclude that she is so utterly incapable of logical argument she must be brain-impaired. Rather than establishing anything alarming about George Bush's psyche, the article's blatant contradictions and wild assumptions establish Gail Sheehy as "the accidental journalist."

We're told that the young, unfocused George W. "broke his father's heart" and engaged in "boozing to blot out his failures." The evidence for the former President's crushing disappointment and his son's self-medicating? None. Sheehy at least attempts to make a case for her diagnoses of dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, but here, the evidence is laughable: In high school, the young essayist thought "lacerates" was a synonym for the noun "tears." The boy needed some remedial vocabulary work. The fact that his mother had drilled him with flash cards to assist him with reading is also taken as evidence that she had a dyslexic on her hands. The thousands of kids in Catholic schools similarly drilled on vocabulary? Dyslexia!

The case builds. Dyslexics can be loudmouths, and George W. was known as "the Lip" in high school. Winston Churchill might have been dyslexic, and is one of Bush's heroes. Bush has an intense focus on student achievement; dyslexics crave verbal structure, and Bush's standard stump speech "has remained essentially the same for the last seven years." ("I will restore honesty and integrity to Austin"?)

Proof that the governor has a gnat's attention span? As a kid he would sometimes leave a baseball game in the fifth inning, and nowadays "nothing engages Bush's attention for more than an hour." My National Review colleagues and I have spent more than an hour apparently engaging the governor's full attention, but as a non-dyslexic I obviously missed his zoned-out visual cues.

Gail Sheehy's own attention span is open to question, when she can't keep her story straight for a few paragraphs. George W. Bush inherited his "blind drive to win" from his paternal grandmother, but is then labeled a clone of his mother. The dyslexic Bush embraced evangelical Christianity out of a need for spiritual discipline — or he opportunistically learned enough of the "code words" to pander for votes.

Finally, Sheehy explains that like his father, George W. is a "great salesman," particularly of "their own candidacies." Here, I'd really like to see some evidence.