-Caveat Lector- A Dislike Unlike Any Other? Writer Jonathan Chait Brings Bush-Hating Out of the Closet By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 19, 2003; Page D01
The words tumble out, the hands gesture urgently, as Jonathan Chait explains why he hates George W. Bush. It's Bush's radical policies, says the 31-year-old New Republic writer, and his unfair tax cuts, and his cowboy phoniness, and his favors for corporate cronies, and his heist in Florida, and his dishonesty about his silver-spoon upbringing, and, oh yes, the way he walks and talks. For some of his friends, Chait says at a corner table in a downtown Starbucks, "just seeing his face or hearing his voice causes a physical reaction -- they have to get away from the TV. My sister-in-law describes Bush's existence as an oppressive force, a constant weight on her shoulder, just knowing that George Bush is president." Has this unassuming man in a rumpled sports shirt lifted the lid on a boiling caldron of anti-Bush fury in liberal precincts across America? Or is he just an overcaffeinated, irrational liberal, venting to a minority of like-minded readers? Ramesh Ponnuru, a soft-spoken conservative at National Review, pays Chait a backhanded compliment, writing that "not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly." Ponnuru calls him "smart, funny and completely misguided." Since the president is so likable, he says, the outbreak of Bush hatred "just makes you scratch your head." Chait, a doctor's son from suburban Detroit, obviously didn't create the Bush-bashing debate. But his recent "Bush Hatred" cover story helped bring the subject out of the closet, where it can be dissected and diagnosed as part of the lefties-are-from-Mars, right-wingers-are-from-Venus shoutfest. Hatred, of course, is such an unpleasant word. Some afflicted with the condition would describe it as being steamed, ticked, appalled, revolted or otherwise fed up with Bush. But the salient characteristic is the scowling intensity of these feelings, particularly for liberals who despair that the other side controls the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. Mainstream journalism, with its traditional parameters, has somehow failed to connect with the notion that there are lots of Americans who walk around sputtering about Dubya -- despite fairly healthy approval ratings for a third-year incumbent. The press was filled with stories about Clinton-haters, but Bush-hating is either more restrained or more out of control, depending on who's keeping score. A spate of liberal books are smacking the president around: David Corn's "The Lies of George W. Bush"; "Bushwhacked," by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose; Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling"; Joe Conason's "Big Lies"; and Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." (These, of course, follow a flood of best-selling conservative books by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and others.) The war in Iraq is a key factor. Corn, the Nation's Washington bureau chief, says he pitched his book in the spring of 2002 and his agent got no nibbles. But when he submitted a one-paragraph outline last October, during the run-up to the war, six publishing houses asked to see him immediately, and he had offers the next day. "Having uninformed hatred of anybody is probably not a good thing," Corn says. "But if you have reason to believe the president of the United States is lying to you about significant matters, then you have damn good reason to be damn upset." The other side is getting upset as well. David Brooks, the former Weekly Standard writer who recently became a New York Times columnist, took vigorous exception to Chait's piece, writing that "the quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. . . . The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves." "I get the feeling that some Democrats had so much hatred for Bush that they had no hatred left over for Saddam," Brooks says in an interview. "Conversely, some Republicans had so much hatred for Clinton they could never bring themselves to support some of the good things he did." But, he admits, "I wish I'd been more critical during the Clinton years. I was reluctant to attack people I liked." Brooks calls Chait a good journalist, but adds: "After you say you hate the way Bush walks and talks, you can never again ask readers to trust your judgment on anything involving Bush." The New Republic's editor complained in a letter to the Times that Brooks had ignored Chait's substantive arguments against Bush. And Chait says that gee, by the way, Republicans set a "perjury trap" and impeached a popular Democrat, and yet "suddenly it's time to declare president-hating out of bounds." Such attitudes draw a chuckle from Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio talk show host whose new book is called "Shut Up and Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics and the UN are Subverting America." "What drives them nuts is that people actually like Bush," she says. "Even if they disagree with him, they think he's a good person." But for many liberals, "Bush isn't just wrong, he's evil. The axis of evil for these guys is George Bush, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld." The debate inevitably slams into reverse by examining the antipathy for all things Clintonian (Ingraham, for instance, wrote a highly critical book on Hillary). After all, the libs say, Bill Clinton was accused by his feverish foes of such absurdities as murder and drug-running, and denounced by more mainstream Republicans, such as Indiana Rep. Dan Burton, who once called Clinton a "scumbag" and reenacted the Vince Foster shooting with a pumpkin. But as National Review's Byron York points out, one far-left Web site accuses the Bush family of involvement in hundreds of deaths, while others liken the president to Hitler (you can order a Bush T-shirt with a swastika in place of the "s") or just call him an idiot (Toostupidtobepresident.com). York also notes that Sheldon Drobny, who is arranging financing for a liberal talk radio network, has alleged online that the president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, did business with the Third Reich but that "as in any fascist regime, the press is prevented from publishing it." Fringe Web sites aside, liberals insist that Bush-bashing is "different from Clinton-hating and Nixon-hating," as Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor of the New Yorker, puts it. The reason: It's not personal, in the way that conservatives saw Clinton "as a '60s hippie and hated him for that." Hertzberg, whose friends openly disdain the commander in chief -- "The phrase 'President Bush' hurts their eardrums" -- is among those who proudly refuse to Get Over the high court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. "Bush lost in the vote of the people, and his legitimacy is hard to accept," he says. "Having lost the popular vote, he took no account of the special circumstances of his election and governed as if there was a popular mandate for the whole program of the hard right." Why, then, did Florida quickly fade as a journalistic issue? "The media did not want to face the idea that we had an illegitimately installed president," Hertzberg says. "That's too big a piece of bad news that shakes too many kinds of civic faith." Others are fuming not so much about the recount as about Bush's self-portrait as a compassionate conservative. "In 2000 the press did a historically awful job" of exposing the gap between Bush's soothing rhetoric and his conservative record, Chait says. One of the few points of agreement is that Bush has done to the Democrats what Clinton did to the GOP: pilfered their best issues. Just as Clinton seized credit for welfare reform and crime fighting, Bush has stolen the opposition's thunder on such perennial liberal causes as education and prescription drugs for the elderly. "Being beaten is never fun," Ponnuru says, "particularly when you're being beaten by someone you consider a moron." But the consensus breaks down over whether Bush has been deceiving the public -- not just over his decision to invade Iraq, a debate that continues to rage, but also whether he misrepresented his tax cuts as helping the middle class when they are heavily tilted to the wealthy. The ball is hit back and forth, across the net that divides the media landscape, from those who cheer Fox to those who swear by NPR. On the left: Slate columnist Michael Kinsley writes that he and other liberals view Bush as "pretty dumb -- though you're not supposed to say it and we usually don't." Bush is also, writes Kinsley, "a remarkably successful liar." On the right: Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time, sees the anti-Bush "contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological. . . . Bush's great crime is that he is the illegitimate president who became consequential -- revolutionizing American foreign policy, reshaping economic policy and dominating the political scene ever since his emergence as the post-9/11 war president." On the left: Paul Krugman sees a huge double standard, insisting there is "no way to be both honest and polite" about the administration's deceptions. "There's nothing on the liberal side that compares to the bile we've routinely gotten on the right," the New York Times columnist says in an interview. "After years of extreme attacks from conservative pundits and politicians, now there's a little bit of feistiness on the other side and it's 'Oh, those rude people!' They themselves continue to do slash-and-burn, and the other side can't. It's amazing how thin-skinned some of these guys are." What, in the end, is the impact of this anti-Bush animus? To hear conservatives tell it, the liberals are being self-destructive by constantly and fervently denouncing the president. "After a while," says Ingraham, "it sounds like they're not respecting the intelligence of the average American. It's become a brand for the angry left." To hear liberals tell it, the fury at Bush could fuel a Democratic surge in 2004 and helps explain the improbable success of Howard Dean. In this view, the party doesn't need milquetoast Democrats who blur their differences with Bush as much as two-fisted candidates ready to punch him out. "Many Democratic partisans looked for a champion who would take on Bush directly, with passion and vigor, who would call Bush on his false statements," David Corn says. Dean "mirrored the anger and disgust felt by many grass-roots Democrats." It was against this backdrop that Chait felt compelled to speak out. "It's become social taboo to question Bush's legitimacy in any way, or even his fitness to hold office," he says. "It's seen as a mark of being hyper-partisan and bitter." Chait's New Republic editors urged him to write a coolly analytical piece about Bush's failings, but he waved them off. "I felt I was being slightly dishonest by not confessing my own feelings," he says. Bush-hating, it turns out, can be good business. Chait has gotten so much reaction that he and Ponnuru have been making the talk show rounds and are working with a speaker's bureau. But he's also gotten some nasty e-mail messages, one of which, perhaps inevitably, was titled: "Why I Hate Jonathan Chait." © 2003 The Washington Post Company www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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