NY Times
Magazine
Published:
October 17, 2004
''Just in the past few months,''
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient
facts,''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the
Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden
was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a
few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the
president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the
peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army
and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden
recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on
the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My
instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all
as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good
enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are
trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an
extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from
cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to
generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested
explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed
to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his
''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed
over it.'' The old pro
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal
realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity
-connects to a single word, ''faith,'' aand faith asserts its hold ever more on
debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the
personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also
shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has
demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides
and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often
swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its
rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see
in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the
administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain
his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance
of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A
writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian
certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public
consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told
me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator
of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were
any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!''
(Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these
remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been
enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and
temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence
cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush
treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was
like ''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to
the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans
calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and
certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were
willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they
thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire
if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public
servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being
treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it.
But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many
requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a
letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with
this article in any way.
Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left
meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with
the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal
gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still
others, like Senator Carl Levin of
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to
piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking
senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those
days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for
the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion
that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in
the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European
countries, like
''I don't know why you're talking about
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr.
President, you may have thought that I said
Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with
administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas
party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were
right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''
This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that
December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat,
would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not
discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a
longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)
This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based
on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create
doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the
decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be
more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a
He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was
ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added
advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith.
Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a
progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was asked during
the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy
to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect.
In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in
''I've never lived around poor people,'' Wallis remembers Bush saying. ''I
don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white
Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?''
Wallis recalls replying, ''You need to listen to the poor and those who live
and work with poor people.''
Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson,
and said, ''I want you to hear this.'' A month later, an almost identical line
-- ''many in our country do not know thee pain of poverty, but we can listen to
those who do'' -- ended up in the inaugural address.
That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant, matching his
impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly unafraid of engaging with a
diverse group. The president has an array of interpersonal gifts that fit well
with this fearlessness -- a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to ranging
among different types of people, searching for the outlines of what will take
shape as principles.
Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been forced to
wrestle with its ''left brain'' opposite -- a struggle, across 30 years, with
the critical and analytical skills so prized in
Biden, who early on became disenchanted with
Bush's grasp of foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate
friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most
successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and
weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us
average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our
weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I
don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone
there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now
as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a catch phrase --
he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A.
president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from
One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual
corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case cracker'' problem. The
case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in
time; the various ''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class
against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote
rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first
few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world
is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good
reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate,
and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short,
thoughtful second-guessing.
George W. Bush, who went off to
Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training, what George W.
Bush learned instead during these fitful years were lessons about faith and its
particular efficacy. It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday,
George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that
point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his
career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush
about a faith ''intervention'' of sorts at the
His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was
clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and
the spirit, but it doesn't do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years
after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from
one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period.
It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the
Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town's
most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president's
father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and
established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle
investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.
Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in
Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's
board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible
candidacy for the governorship of
Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in "The Price of Loyalty,"
at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush
asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a
joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting
Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top
official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and
less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top
lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle,
who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the
Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture
during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the
confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm
was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted
quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from
cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's
presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without
betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell
and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an
issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed
questions.
Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily shaped by its
president, by his character, personality and priorities. It is a process that
unfolds on many levels. There are, of course, a chief executive's policies,
which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few months
along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to adopt the boss's
phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If a president fishes, people buy
poles; if he expresses displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support
the judgment. A staff channels the leader.
A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White
House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation,
an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience
with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have
faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be rewarded. All through the White
House, people were channeling the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why
should they?
Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to overlook what
a difficult time this must have been for George W. Bush. For nearly three
decades, he had sat in classrooms, and then at mahogany tables in corporate
suites, with little to contribute. Then, as governor of
But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in the large
conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He guided a ruling party. Every
issue that entered that rarefied sanctum required a complex decision, demanding
focus, thoroughness and analytical potency.
For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely
aware of his weaknesses -- and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty or
need or confusion, even to senior officials -- must have presented an untenable
bind. By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped
talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at
their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White
House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy
confidants. The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the
modern era, and ''it's both exclusive and exclusionary,'' Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the
neoconservative policy group, told me. ''It's a too tightly managed
decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of
people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range
of alternatives being offered.''
On
Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion of
This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for
months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political
tactics -- think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research -- now
began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush
turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power
and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish. They never
do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first
debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price
affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples
the company. There's a startled look -- how'd that happen? In this case, the
challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the
Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading
military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we
should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora
Bora. Many have also been critical of the president's
handling of
It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question
about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first
used the telltale word ''crusade'' in public. ''This is a new kind of -- a new
kind of evil,'' he said. ''And we understand. And the American people are
beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a
while.''
Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari
Fleischer tried to perform damage control. ''I think what the president was
saying was -- had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise,
other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and
the nations around the world to join.'' As to ''any connotations that would
upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would
regret if anything like that was conveyed.''
A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in
the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey
as head of the president's faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that
the initiative was not about ''compassionate conservatism,'' as originally
promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to
consolidate and energize that part of the base.
Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the
cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. ''Jim, how ya doin', how ya
doin'!'' he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush
excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis's book, ''Faith
Works.'' His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was
palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril,
seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he
was doing fine, '''but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you
said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this
war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't
devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and
desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war
on terrorism.'''
Bush replied that that was why
''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your leadership
on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we
drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll
never defeat the threat of terrorism.''
Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke
again after that.
''When I was first with Bush in
But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have
time to entertain doubters? In a speech in
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen
Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White
House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't
fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush
presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based
community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured
something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do.''
Who besides guys like me are part of the
reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush
exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of
weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the
election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials
or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised.
''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify
what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you
guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who
was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when
we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist
arms, or be overt.''
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate
on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell
putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith.
That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power
prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its
possession? Can confidence -- true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be
earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is
not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in
Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run one hell of a
campaign on it.
George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral
engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely
voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty,
fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the
darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president
and the just God who affirms him.
The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and
artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed
''Ask President Bush'' events with supporters around the country, sessions
filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the
feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ''I've
voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from
Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly
Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago,
for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in
A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves
as evangelical or ''born again.'' While this group leans Republican, it
includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly
draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many
from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn't
vote in 2000 -- potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a
close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.
This signaling system -- forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the
president's specific fingerprint -- carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee,
the moderate Republican senator from
Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the
base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is
harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through
church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in
the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based
president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous
rage.
Righteous rage -- that's what Hardy Billington
felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in
By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000
assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the
podium. ''The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I'm
not much of a talker,'' Billington, a shy man with
three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me
several days later. ''I've never been so frightened.''
But Billington said he ''looked to God'' and said
what was in his heart. ''The
The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally
arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and
gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine.
They got it -- and ''it'' was the faith.
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by
Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own
consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You
think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of
you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern
Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see,
you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of
The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports
them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like
abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home
and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is
something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to
their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a
vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well
rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was
rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.
Bush's speech that day in
The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge -- his
fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his
ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn
the wheel of history.
Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the
end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by
Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.
''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president
to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of
Bush supporters. ''Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices
to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this
time.''
But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's hand, Billington remembered being reserved. '''I really thank God
that you're the president' was all I told him.'' Bush, he recalled, said,
''Thank you.''
''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I
believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say,
you know, in public.''
Is there anyone in
''I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's
throat,'' George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block
away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime
supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at
one time or another, they had all given large
contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many
of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a
long way from
The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to
plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will
alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the
luncheon come true.
He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to
expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided
to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about
what they heard, he said that ''Osama bin Laden would
like to overthrow the Saudis . . .
then we're in trouble. Because
they have a weapon. They have the oil.'' He said that there will be an
opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies
during his second term.
''Won't that be amazing?'' said Peter Stent, a
rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. ''Can you imagine? Four appointments!''
After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what
he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to
peak.
Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in
''I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going to push it,''
he said, and then tried out a line. ''Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of
The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but clearly
reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend whatever it takes to
protect our kids in
In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that ''hands
down,'' he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race.
He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
of
But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind:
his second term.
''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with
fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.'' The
victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least,
until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be
quacking like a duck.''
Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended
the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later:
''I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so
strongly he will win.'' Yet one part of Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff
gave Gildenhorn -- a board member of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn
said, makes him ''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they
have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.
''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though,
that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said,
''But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ''I'm
happy he's certain of victory and that he's ready to burst forth into his
second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big
things that he's planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might
invade or what might happen in
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will
attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity.
Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and
bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated
until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of
competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the
watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the
subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular
conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the
world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with
George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the
White House.
''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not
triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach
for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that
moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be
a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no
reflection.
''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a
moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not
-- not ever -- to the thing we as humanss so very much want.''
And what is that?
''Easy certainty.''