Avian Chorus

It’s the kind of admission you’re likely to hear only when you’re all alone at the end of the evening, and the bright lights have faded to blue. You might not hear it even then. But many Democrats already miss George W. Bush.

True, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison declared earlier this year that the Bush presidency was to blame for a “national near death experience,” and one can imagine her saying good riddance to a man whom she claims “turned every government agency into a hit squad.” Her outrage was steeped in nostalgia, however, because in the same column she dialed up the five stages of grief made famous by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

Talk about hooks! This was more than Randy Meisner thinking in waltz time “about a woman who might have loved me, and I never knew.” This was a clue. Morrison is not alone in missing the man she thinks she loathes. Although someone other than George W. Bush will be president by this time next year, happy progressives are scarce indeed.

You know I’ve always been a dreamer (spent my life running ‘round), and it’s so hard to change—can’t seem to settle down. But the dreams I’ve seen lately keep turning out the same, perhaps because even Barack Obama’s optimism depends entirely on George W. Bush.

Think about “Change you can believe in.” If that slogan works at all, it works only through implied contrast with the kind of change you can’t believe in even after it happens. The once and future progressive conceit about being part of a “reality-based community” is officially on vacation (or standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona), because the election year directive is to embrace only what you choose to believe, while ignoring the rest of the real as much as possible. Without the magnifying glass of George W. Bush to focus his sunshine, Obama would simply revert to form as a glib politician of thin experience and questionable judgment. Accordingly, his campaign is little more than a valentine to denial, which of course is stage one in how people grieve.

Obama’s main rival also suffers from denial, both about herself and about the chief executive she wants to replace. Consider the question of smarts. Self-consciously liberal pundits routinely praise Hillary Clinton for being smart and serious. Conservatives are less impressed. She claims 80 trips abroad while First Lady as foreign policy experience, but is blind to the irony of doing that while asking to be judged on her own merits. Meanwhile, although the man she hopes to “clean up after” never parlayed one thousand dollars and a subscription to the Wall Street Journal into big profits in cattle futures, he did graduate from Yale, learn to fly a difficult jet, and earn an MBA. In spite of those accomplishments, many Democrats still think his touch-and-go vocabulary, jaundiced view of the United Nations, and willingness to claim Jesus his favorite philosopher are signs of stupidity.

Anger is the second stage on the continuum of response to trauma, and a textbook expression of that emotion was offered by the two towns in Vermont that voted earlier this month to indict the president on charges of “violating the Constitution.” While Green Mountain State activists high-five each other over pints of “Chunky Monkey” and “Cherry Garcia,” their allies in the mainstream media play a game of guilt by association, because the anger they feel toward President Bush often extends even to things that involve him only peripherally. For example, former newscaster Bree Walker makes her home in California, but bought property in Texas that used to belong to Cindy Sheehan, and promptly professed herself appalled by billboards that welcome people to Crawford by describing it as the “Hometown of President George W. Bush.”

Bushian influence is a pernicious thing to pundits of her ilk. Walker, not a Texas Ranger, now promises to “stand by with gallons of white paint and enough brushes and rollers for every man, woman and child who'll join us in eradicating what the folks hereabouts may someday come to see as an obscenity and smear on the good name of Crawford.” If the townsfolk don’t rush to her paint brushes, Walker will probably trade Diet Dr. Pepper for a soft drink with no roots in the Lone Star State. As a subheading in Newsweek magazine recently screeched, “Texas produces more carbon emissions than most countries, but the state government and business community don't seem too concerned.”

It’s a predicament for a progressive: When you’re looking for your freedom, nobody seems to care, and you can’t find the door; can’t find it anywhere. And so you turn to bargaining, which is stage three in the grieving process. In the run-up to this election, neither leading Democrat has the military credentials of John McCain, and while Obama has been gracious about that in a “yes, but” kind of way, Clinton surrogates like Gloria Steinem (!) have been trotted out to note that Bill Clinton used to be commander-in-chief, and Hillary sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and that old Republican may not have the right kind of military experience anyhow.

Democrats who ignore that train wreck of an argument from the Clinton camp face other hurdles as they come to terms with the realization that the road claimed by Barack Obama might be a touch too high: As Fred Siegel mused in City Journal, “Unlike [John F.] Kennedy, who didn’t think of himself in messianic terms, Obama seems short on irony.” (Memo to the Obama camp: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young got it wrong: You who are on the road must have a code that we can live by). Faced with the perpetual snark of one candidate in the Democratic field and the earnest emptiness of the other, even some party loyalists are making peace with our outgoing president. More about that in a minute.

When there’s nothing to believe in but you’re running back for more, you get depressed, and so we’ve come to stage four in the grieving process. With George W. Bush out of office, left-wing newspapers in England won’t have the fun tracking malapropisms that they’ve had for almost eight years. Monica Crowley, who looks like Bree Walker but thinks more clearly, summed up the dominant narrative by suggesting that mocking Barack Obama is like “clubbing a baby seal,” while mocking Hillary Clinton invites retribution from a politician who “swims in vindictiveness.” John McCain is not eloquent but also not likely to take as much criticism for verbal gaffes as George W. Bush has done.

Knowing all that, we come then to acceptance, the last stage of dealing with grief. The president has charmed more than a few of his opponents. Even people who disagree with him admit that he is trustworthy and basically humble. He does not suffer from overweening ambition, delusions of grandeur, or a long-simmering need to settle scores (you may draw your own conclusions as to who does). As a consequence, George W. Bush invites a second look and sometimes even a measure of forgiveness from people who disagree with him. Irish activist and musician Bob Geldof furnished a recent example of this kind of acceptance in a profile for Time magazine.

Geldof had accompanied the American president on a trip to Africa. While he still bristles at the geopolitical gamble that the president made in Iraq, he also notes approvingly that “this is the person who has quadrupled aid to the poorest people on the planet.” His report was published soon after actress Angelina Jolie wrote an essay for the Washington Post expressing cautious optimism about the prospects for “humanitarian progress” in Iraq.

Any look at the current scene through the lens of an Eagles song and a popular model of emotional response to traumatic events must leave something out, but it’s safe to say that whether they know it or not, his enemies will miss George W. Bush for all the reasons given here, and not least because any president who makes good on the “regime change” talk of his easily-distracted predecessor knows something about how to “take it to the limit one more time.”

POSTSCRIPT: Big thanks to Laer for adding to the fun with his link to this piece. The man knows his discography.