To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

First ad tells us "Wes Clark is a big stud and a smart guy" - New Republic

In a quick survey of the Democratic candidates' current TV spots, Ryan Lizza suggests:

The newest ad in the race is also the most powerful. Watching the Clark campaign stumble throughout the autumn, it has been easy to forget that the whole rationale for his candidacy is his biography. His first ad attempts to correct this. . . . We learn that Clark "stopped a campaign of terror" (in Kosovo), "liberated a people" (ditto), and "speaks four languages." It's probably the first ad to elevate multilingualism to a campaign issue. But it does a better job explaining why Clark is in the race than his nine weeks of uninspired campaigning. Wes Clark is a big stud and a smart guy, the ad tells us. And, for now, that's all you need to know.

Hey, don't knock multi-lingualism. It's not so long ago the irrepressible Don Rumsfeld snapped at a German reporter, "I've made myself clear. Don't you understand English?" While WKC's Russian may be more useful for reading great novels than conducting diplomacy these days, his command of Spanish and French has to add a worldly luster to his conversations with potential allies. It beats inventing "Freedom Fries" and thinking oneself the smartest kid in second grade.

"Bush a man of fierce anger," says former aide

Yet David Frum, former Bush speechwriter, is convinced Dubya is the "The Right Man," as his apologia for the president by the same name would have it. The man who wrote the "axis of evil" speech is quoted in a fascinating psychological study of George Bush, written by Oliver James for Britain's Guardian under the title, "So George, how do you feel about your mom and dad?" While James' conclusions about the Bushs' family dynamics are entertainingly over the top, the piece combines some interesting background information with psychobabble of a relatively high order.

The article's opening anecdote is deliciously outre:

As the alcoholic George Bush approached his 40th birthday in 1986, he had achieved nothing he could call his own. He was all too aware that none of his educational and professional accomplishments would have occurred without his father. He felt so low that he did not care if he lived or died. Taking a friend out for a flight in a Cessna aeroplane, it only became apparent he had not flown one before when they nearly crashed on take-off. Narrowly avoiding stalling a few times, they crash-landed and the friend breathed a sigh of relief - only for Bush to rev up the engine and take off again.

Not long afterwards, staring at his vomit-spattered face in the mirror, this dangerously self-destructive man fell to his knees and implored God to help him and became a teetotalling, fundamentalist Christian. David Frum, his speechwriter, described the change: "Sigmund Freud imported the Latin pronoun id to describe the impulsive, carnal, unruly elements of the human personality. [In his youth] Bush's id seems to have been every bit as powerful and destructive as Clinton's id. But sometime in Bush's middle years, his id was captured, shackled and manacled, and locked away."

Though Bush is more reckless and arrogant than ever, it's reassuring to know that he conquered his drinking problem with the help of a fundamentalist faith that all problems come in just two colors, black and white.

Apparently, the younger George Bush was a constant source of innocent merriment to both his friends and family:

Contemporaries at Yale say he was like the John Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled funseeker.

He was aggressively anti-intellectual and hostile to east-coast preppy types like his father, sometimes cruelly so. On one occasion he walked up to a matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, "So, what's sex like after 50, anyway?"

A direct and loutish challenge to his father's posh sensibility came aged 25, after he had drunkenly crashed a car. "I hear you're looking for me," he sneered at his father, "do you want to go mano a mano, right here?"

As he grew older, the fury towards his father was increasingly directed against himself in depressive drinking. But it was not all his father's fault. There was also his insensitive and domineering mother.

See, money can't buy happiness, but surprise, happiness isn't what Bush is about:

The outcome of this childhood was what psychologists call an authoritarian personality. Authoritarianism was identified shortly after the second world war as part of research to discover the causes of fascism. As the name suggests, authoritarians impose the strictest possible discipline on themselves and others - the sort of regime found in today's White House, where prayers precede daily business, appointments are scheduled in five-minute blocks, women's skirts must be below the knee and Bush rises at 5.45am, invariably fitting in a 21-minute, three-mile jog before lunch.

That little confusion about whether Muslims and Christians worship the same god doesn't trouble the president.

. . . It is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".

Bush's deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how he became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfil her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian fundamentalist. By totally identifying with an extreme version of their strict, religion-fuelled beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his unconscious hatred for them was channelled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid the world of evil.

As Frum put it: "Id-control is the basis of Bush's presidency but Bush is a man of fierce anger." That anger now rules the world.

Now, almost unnoticed thus far by the press, Wesley Clark has been hinting at this inherent instability in Bush's character, first on "Face the Nation" last week and recently in the Iowa debate.

Someone, probably Chris Lehane, thinks that Clark can emphasize his "objectivity" by paying George Bush snarky, left-handed compliments, but I think he's only serving to show that there's entirely too much anger and testosterone flying around both sides of the aisle. As Clark told Bob Schieffer,

There's a lot of anger in this country about George Bush and the Republican Party. President Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. He proved instead to be reckless in getting us into Iraq, radical in terms of his social policies in the United States, and--and people are outraged by that as well as by the 2000 election, and--and Governor Dean has been very effective at--at exploiting the anger that's out there residually.

But I'm not running to bash George Bush. A lot of Americans really love him. They love what he represents, a man who's overcome adversity in his life from alcoholism and pulled his marriage back together and--and moved forward. But I'm running because I think this country must have better leadership in moving forward.

More subtly but perhaps not advisedly, Gen. Clark told Tom Brokaw during the Iowa debate:

" . . The Republican Party does not have the monopoly on faith in this country, and there are just as many Democrats who believe in religion, they go to church, they read the Bible, they say their prayers, they believe in God as there are Republicans. And I think that you’ll see that in this next election.

I think what you had in 2000 may have been unique. And I think maybe the president, President Bush, had a compelling personal story about that. . . .

The coming campaign is going to be unbelievably ugly, and anger may be what fuels the eventual Democratic nominee as well as the weekend warrior occupying the White House, John Edwards pleas for optimism not withstanding. Bringing Bush's unfortunate past to the fore will not sway a single voter convinced George Bush is living proof the lord works in mysterious ways, and in fact, intervened on Bush's behalf in 2000 to save America.

I'm undecided on whether the new displays of anger Clark is showing are only attempts to grill some red meat, Dean style, or whether he's really getting po'd now that he's constantly put on the defensive. I'm not so sure that I want to see Howard Dean and Wesley Clark get in each other's face, nor do I believe George's Bush's psyche is a valid issue. His record speaks for itself.