Four More Years
By Marni Soupcoff
There was a moment not long after the first Presidential debate when I felt ready to despair. I firmly disagreed with most of John Kerry’s policy positions, and his lack of principle and backbone turned me off considerably.
But George Bush who was still my man despite his irresponsibly spendthrift ways, had let me down miserably. Every time he was asked a debate question, he conquered it with a vacant, lop-sided smile followed by a very long pause. When he finally got around to answering, he sounded like a high school freshman who’d been up all night memorizing the Cliffs Notes, but had never actually gotten around to reading the book.
What was it, I started wondering, that I had once found so compelling about this man?
My answer came on election night. At one point during the evening’s coverage, the network I was watching cut to scenes of the President and his family watching the results in the White House. They were all gathered around the television, and they looked pleased and mellow--a reflection of how good things were already looking for Dubya.
But of all the viewers in the room, no one seemed happier than Barney Bush, the President’s spunky Scottish terrier. He was taking in the results stretched out on the carpet in front of his doting master. And a large and inviting looking toy ball lay under a coffee table not far behind him. One look at the domestic scene reaffirmed two things: Barney was still an integral part of the Bush clan, and the Bushes were still as likeably human as ever.
This is, in a nutshell, why I think the President won a second term. Not that Barney’s presence magically catapulted him into office again. (Not every voter is enough of a dog lover to appreciate the poetry of a White House littered with squeaky toys.) But Barney highlights the fact that, after four stressful years, Bush is still the real person he was when he took office--a man with guts, hubris, foibles, principles, and persistence.
And a man who spends perhaps the most important night of his life watching TV with his dog.
That takes a certain softness of spirit that Bush’s critics don’t like to fathom. To them he is the ignorant warmonger, brutish in his arrogance and apparent eagerness to attack.
But one simply can’t form a meaningful and authentic bond with a pet without reserving a certain corner of the soul for warmth and empathy. Bush’s relationship with little Barney therefore reveals a part of the tough-talking Texan that is sensitive and genuine--the very elements people tend to value most in their friends, relatives and, I’d venture, their politicians.
Of course, it would be naive not to acknowledge that Bush and his campaign team are keenly aware of Barney’s considerable public relations value, and do a good job of building the little dog’s profile. (Barney has his own web page and has starred in two holiday web movies.) Bush’s team may very well have placed Barney, that camera-loving fur ball, in the room with the President on election night just to create a warm and fuzzy photo-op.
Yet, however he got there, only Barney himself would ever have thought to leave a toy ball lying around right in the middle of the room. (It’s how a dog’s mind works.) The tiny element of chaos shows that Barney had the run of the place before the media arrived; he wasn’t simply parachuted in at the last moment as a domestic accent.
Indeed his owners have consistently shown a tendency for indulging Barney, even when no one is looking. When the Secret Service rushed into the President’s bedroom to whisk him and the first lady to a more secure location on one of the nights after 9/11, they found Barney sleeping there as well.
Of course, there is more to being a good President than just being the kind and down to earth everyman that Barney reveals Bush to be. A good President also has to choose the right advisors, make difficult decisions quickly, persuade people without alienating them, and stay stubbornly firm when morality calls for it. Bush has done each of these things with varying degrees of success, and will no doubt learn to do all of them better the more practice he gets. But his greatest strength remains one that can’t be learned or faked: being an extremely decent, ordinary guy.
It’s a trait that voters, like Scottish terriers, have a knack for sniffing out.
Marni Soupcoff's column appears on Monday at TAEmag.com.
