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 eorge
Bush took a lot of criticism when in a Republican primary debate
in Iowa — two years and ages ago — he said that his favorite
political philosopher was Jesus Christ.
Liberals jumped
on him for a supposedly nascent violation of the separation of church
and state. Even some conservatives knocked him for such an unreflective
answer and one that had nothing to do with public life.
I thought the
critics were over-wrought, but shared some of the worries about
Bush personalizing everything. Only now do I realize how profound
and important that answer was.
Bush is not
just on a mission these days, as so many observers say, he is convicted,
convinced deep in his heart that God put him in the White House
for this moment and that God will bless our cause.
When he says,
as he did last night, that "even in tragedy, especially in
tragedy, God is near," it's not just nice rhetoric, but a truth
he lives — and leads — by.
This is what
the gleam in Bush's eye is all about: it's not just determination,
not just anger, not just sincerity, but all of those things tempered
and elevated by faith.
Bush, I suspect,
sees himself as a spiritual warrior. At a town-hall meeting in California
a few weeks ago, Bush was asked what people could pray about, both
for him and for the country.
Bush said they
should pray "that there's a shield of protection, so that if
the evil ones try to hit us again, that we've done everything we
can, physically, and that there is a spiritual shield that protects
the country."
A few months
ago that statement would have elicited guffaws from the press corps.
This time it went basically unnoticed.
Bush's answer
showed that he believes the war on terrorism doesn't just have military,
diplomatic, and financial dimensions, but also a spiritual dimension.
The war, then, is his most important faith-based initiative.
Bush says over
and over that the war on terrorism is a fight between good and evil.
He means it, not just in the sense that it is a battle between things
we like and things we don't, but in an even deeper Tolkienesque
sense. For Bush, this is a battle between light and darkness that
we almost don't have a public vocabulary for anymore.
Although Bush
is trying to revive a part of it. As
John J. Miller points out, Bush used the word "evil"
last night five times. If I were to pull out one phrase that was
the moral and intellectual heart of the speech it would be "evil
is real."
What a strange
thing for a president to say in a forum usually devoted to long
lists of popular programs. But it was somehow comforting to hear
him say it.
Why? Because
it is true.
Can you imagine
Bill Clinton making evil the centerpiece of a State of the Union?
I doubt it, especially since he had to devote so much of his presidency
to a kind of post-modernist relativism in which nothing is ever
quite what it seems (not words, not sex, not promises).
In this, Bill
Clinton captured something important in the culture. Absolute judgment
of the sort that is inherent in the word "evil" was out
of style, so the word had fallen into desuetude or lived on only
as a campy word of mockery or fun (e.g. "Dr. Evil" in
the Austin Powers's movies).
But Bush seems
instinctively to understand evil. I imagine this is not because
— say, like Winston Churchill — he is widely read or has
a wide experience with the world. It can only be because of his
faith.
In that sense,
we should all be grateful that Christ is his favorite political
philosopher. If God has a plan for Bush, so far it appears to be
a pretty good one.
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