Sore Winners
by John Powers
EXCERPT
Chapter 1: The Six Faces of George W. Bush
Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, Please stand up
--Eminem
On June 4, 2002, President George W. Bush held a diplomatic summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinean Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas at a palace in Aqaba, a small coastal city best known for the Hollywood-fed myth that it had once been captured by Lawrence of Arabia. After the day's discussions, the leaders strolled together toward the world's cameras, crossing a bridge built over a swimming pool. It was the kind of culminating image, fat with metaphor--the bridging of divided peoples, the President acting as a uniter--that the Bush White House likes to call "the money shot," perhaps oblivious of its porn-world associations. The President's advance team hadn't just mapped out the leaders' path, as earlier White House staffs might have done. They had asked the Jordanians to build a bridge over the pool so that Bush and the others could walk over water on their way to the banks of cameras. When the first bridge proved too narrow to accommodate the men side by side, the Bush people had it torn down and a new one built that was wide enough. They were well aware that this visual iconography would matter far more to American TV viewers than anything the President would actually say.
Ever since Parson Weems cooked up the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, our presidents have come robed in mythology, much of it consciously crafted. In the 1920s, the founding father of American advertising, Edward L. Bernays, was asked to help Calvin Coolidge fight the perception that he was icy and remote. Bernays brought Al Jolson and a cohort of his fellow vaudevilleans to breakfast at the White House, an event that prompted the humanizing headline "President Nearly Laughs"--and opened the gate for events staged by media advisors (or pseudo-events, as Daniel Boorstin termed them). Just as advertising has grown more sophisticated in the last eighty years, so has presidential image making. If it was by serendipity that the musical Camelot opened less than one month after John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was his widow Jackie who, in her sole interview after his assassination, planted the idea of America happy-ever-aftering in that fantasy of JFK's White House.
Spooked by the power of Kennedy's dashing image, Richard Nixon put himself in the hands of media advisors in 1968, and, as Joe McGinnis famously chronicled in The Selling of the President, they pulled off an extraordinary feat. Tricky Dick was repackaged as The New Nixon, a changed man whose painfully forced smile was something a divided nation could believe in. Small wonder that the Nixon team's techniques were studied and refined by Ronald Reagan, who invested every manipulated scenario with enormous charisma, and Bill Clinton, who knew all the tricks in The Gipper's playbook--it wasn't for nothing that the boy from racy Hot Springs, Arkansas, sold himself as The Man from Hope.
The current White House has scrutinized these precedents and more. No president has controlled his PR more tightly than Bush, who watched aghast as his father lost control of his persona--going from sturdy Cold Warrior to vomiting babbler--and plummeted from 89 percent approval ratings in the summer of 1991 to 37.7 percent of the vote in the 1992 election. Conscious that presidents, like all consumer products, rise and fall on their image, his staff treats each event with the lavish precision of a Michael Mann movie. They'd never let him go on TV wearing a cardigan, as Jimmy Carter did in what's remembered as his ruinous Malaise Speech. He didn't actually use the word "malaise," but such is the power of myth. Bush's handlers know that they're courting trouble whenever they put him out there on his own. That's why he held only eleven solo press conferences in the first three years of his presidency (in the same period, his dad held more than sixty). Like Ben Affleck, who can't hold the screen all by himself, their man needs to be propped up with crack production design. When he spoke about the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Adelphia, Dynegy, Rite Aid, and Global Crossing, he stood before a backdrop with the words "Corporate Responsibility" printed again and again as a kind of corroborative wallpaper; when he addressed the nation from Ellis Island on September 11, 2002, an advance team brought in special banks of lights so that the Statue of Liberty would be suitably commanding against the night sky, its pale radiance neatly echoing the blue of the President's necktie; when he served up a major speech on national security, he was carefully situated before Mount Rushmore, as if auditioning for his spot on the squad. And the White House does this sort of thing almost every day. No less a figure than Michael Deaver, who designed Reagan's PR blitzes, told The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that the Bush team has taken packaging a president to a startling new level. He called their work "absolutely brilliant," while conceding that including Bush's head with the Mount Rushmore quartet may have been going a bit "too far."*
Predictably, such transparent but skillful shaping of the President's image horrifies those who think that Bush is a latter-day Wizard of Oz (conveniently forgetting that Clinton did the same thing, albeit less blatantly). They point with glee to ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's remark that, in cabinet meetings, the President was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. They wonder if Bush really calls the shots or whether he's a hologram created by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. They decry the abyss dividing the way the President is presented and what his administration is actually up to behind closed doors: Did he and Cheney privately joke about that big Halliburton contract in Iraq? Critics want to probe behind the myth and learn exactly who did what and when and why. They want to get "inside" the "real" George Bush.
Why? Much of any presidency's meaning lies precisely in its constantly changing overlay of imagery, propaganda, rumor, and journalistic blather. To strip them away in search of the "real" president is like trying to find the real onion by peeling away the layers. This is especially true of George W. Bush, who, like John Kennedy four decades before him, has spawned an astonishing number of personas in a remarkably short time, many of them contradictory. Over the last four years we've had Bush as Regular Guy, Village Idiot, No-Nonsense CEO, Compassionate Conservative, latter-day Prince Hal, and, of course, Moby Dubya devouring any Democrat foolish enough to stray into his path. None of these myths is without its truth, and each has, at times, served the President's purposes. What matters here is not so much George Bush the real man as the idea of "George Bush"--the images of the man that America has been peddled over the last four years.
* The image-building work extends to fiddling with documents that might reflect badly on the president. After Bush's May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the White House website ran a headline, "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But as TheMemoryHole.com revealed, once the insurrection proved stronger than expected, somebody went back and added the word "Major" before "Combat."
Excerpted from Sore Winners by John Powers, Copyright© 2004 by John Powers. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.