The Union In A State
George W. Bush will have to grow into the dramatic new demands of his job. In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer says ‘be patient,’ we’ve got some learning to do as well.
President Bush is not a master of the weapon most immediately available to him – the spoken word.
And that, accidentally and ironically, may be a good thing.
The president is searching for the right words just like the rest of us. Parents are searching for answers for their children. Teachers are slowly learning how to talk to students, friends to mourners, rabbis and priests to congregations.
What we confront is traumatic, unprecedented and unimagined. President Bush will have to learn how to lead in these wholly unexpected circumstances, just as we have to learn to cope, comfort, serve, and carry on. The President’s address to Congress, I think, helped both missions.
He spoke in plain language, without great rhetorical flourish, but elegantly. There were no false notes, no crass slogans and no synthetic emotion.
He did not discover any new reservoir of natural gravitas, but he met the occasion. And he made his case.
“Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom,” the president began. “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”
He spoke specifically and bluntly about the terrorist network associated with Osama bin Laden, and enumerated precise demands on the Taliban, concluding, “They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”
In the aftermath of an atrocity so hard to comprehend and an enemy so invisible and so alien, the president began to put the threat in the context of horrors in history we have come to understand. “We have seen their kind before,” President Bush said. “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century.”
He continued to brace the country. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen.” And he tried to answer the simple question, “What is expected of us?” “I ask you to live your lives,” he said simply. “I ask…for your patience in that will be a long struggle.”
The president had to do many things in this speech, things that were incommensurable and in conflict. In other words, he faced a nearly impossible task, but he struck a fine balance.
He wanted to calm people, but lift morale. He needed to rally the military, but use language compatible with negotiating international coalitions. He had to begin realistically describing an enemy that has no sovereign and no borders, without making the task seem impossible. He had to prepare the country for a long, imprecise conflit that offers no possibility for instant victories or definable conclusions, and he had to do so without adding to the despair of a grieving country.
At momentous junctures like this, we surely yearn for the mythic rhetorical artistry of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, but we know deep down that it just isn’t going to happen in these 21st century times of omnipresent broadcasts and infinite replays. What is attainable today is the shallower theatrical proficiency of Reagan or Clinton, the honed emotiveness and practiced ‘I feel your pain.’
That style is the measure of modern political rhetoric and it’s easy to imagine either former president soothing us and speaking for us in ways more polished than President Bush.
But this time, there can be no illusion of reassurance, no ‘feeling good,’ however fleeting. The news is just too bad. And we don’t wish for or expect comforting illusion from this president at this time and that is proper.
The president, we all hope, will learn and grow into an effective leader for this crisis. And we will learn too – as parents, as teachers, even as citizens.
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