Here are some more examples of Bush Hating, and my theory-- that people hate him because he doesn't care what they think of him. Also, a bit of comparison with Clinton Hating.
George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush."It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."
I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so....Note how Chait thrashes around trying to figure out what bothers him. He says Bush is a radically conservative president in his domestic policies. That is a weird thing to say. He's cut taxes, undoing the small Clinton tax increase, but he's increased spending and has not been conservative domestically. Rather, he is to Democrats what Clinton was to Republicans: a centrist on economic policy, hated despite being relatively close to the other party in economics....
... I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. ....
...
...Bush, on the other hand, has developed into a truly radical president. Like Ronald Reagan, Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. Combined with his stated desire to eliminate virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and Social Security, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state.
...
It was not always this way. During the 2000 election, liberals evinced far less disdain for Bush than conservatives did for Al Gore. As The New York Times reported on the eve of the election, "The gap in intensity between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year."...
...
... Bush has governed as the most partisan president in modern U.S. history. The pillars of his compassionate-conservative agenda--the faith-based initiative, charitable tax credits, additional spending on education--have been abandoned or absurdly underfunded....
...
All this helps answer the oft-posed question of why liberals detest Bush more than Reagan. It's not just that Bush has been more ideologically radical; it's that Bush's success represents a breakdown of the political process. Reagan didn't pretend to be anything other than what he was; his election came at the crest of a twelve-year-long popular rebellion against liberalism. Bush, on the other hand, assumed office at a time when most Americans approved of Clinton's policies. He triumphed largely because a number of democratic safeguards failed. The media overwhelmingly bought into Bush's compassionate-conservative facade and downplayed his radical economic conservatism....
...
Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one, with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature. ...
...
Just as mainstream Democrats and liberals ceased to question Bush's right to hold office, so too did they cease to question his intelligence. If you search a journalistic database for articles discussing Bush's brainpower, you will find something curious. The idea of Bush as a dullard comes up frequently--but nearly always in the context of knocking it down....
...
The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.
Notice the odd statement about nobody calling Bush stupid any more. Well, here is Chait doing it, and you will see other examples below, and I hear it all the time. Much of it does have a bit of balance, as Chait points out, but that is deceptive. It is like a newspaper saying "Some people say Eric Rasmusen takes drugs and beats dogs and small children. But really, that doesn't seem plausible", as an excuse to make unfounded attacks on me.
Notice, too the odd attacks on Bush's veracity. Coming after our Perjurer President, this is very strange. Bush seems pretty typical for a politician. He doesn't tell lies in the normal sense, but he gets things wrong occasionally, he exaggerates, and he spins. Yet he is being painted as a monumental fraud--because of things like de- emphasizing the fact that his tax cut helped rich people. That's not much of a lie.
...
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 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."
...
"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.
...
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."
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."
Mr Latham, who will lead Labour into a federal election expected late next year, gained notoriety two years ago when he broke the arm of a taxi driver after a dispute over a fare. Justifying his action, he said he had done "the bare minimum" in chasing the driver and tackling him to the ground. No charges were ever brought. His election would be likely to generate serious tensions with the United States, Australia's main strategic and defence partner. He once called President George W Bush "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory".
But Bush hatred does seem to be sui generis.Clinton Hating was not a matter of partisanship. People hated Clinton because he was personally immoral and fraudulent, and the public and self-righteous liberals did not mind. Sexual harassment suddenly became OK to liberals, and lying, and corruption. Clinton was a boon to Republicans-- he gave them back Congress and the Statehouses. If he'd been convicted after his Impeachment, it would have been great for the Democrats-- Gore would probably have won the Presidency. Clinton was a notably unsuccessful president, in contrast to Bush's huge and unexpected success in most dimensions (judicial confirmations being a notable failure-- and I don't mean Bush's policies have been good, only that he seems to get what he wants).Bill Clinton was surely disliked by many conservatives, but even taking into consideration his impeachment, their dislike for him was, in certain respects, restrained. No anti-Clinton political movement or candidate ever emerged, only Dole's ironic detachment of the 1996 election. Hillary Clinton is certainly despised by the Right for her far-left sensibilities, but that's largely not the case with her husband, whose policies were relatively moderate and whose rhetoric was nearly always middle of the road. It is true that Ronald Reagan was greatly disliked by the Left, even hated. But it was an antipathy dripping with condescension, and condescension does not easily work itself into the white-hot lather of a Howard Dean -- only the patronizing sneer of a Walter Mondale.
It would be interesting to look for extreme negatives and positives in public opninion polls on Bush and Clinton. I bet Bush has fewer negatives, except with the Establishment and Intelligentsia. He is hated by an elite, whereas Clinton was hated by a broad, though minority, group of Americans.
It's getting late, but here is my current theory on Bush Hating. The reason people hate Bush is that he doesn't care what they think. We all say we like Independent Thinkers, but most people actually dislike them intensely. You aren't supposed to laugh at other people's opinions, especially if they are deeply held and common. You aren't even supposed to be indifferent to them. Rather, you are supposed to behave like Bill Clinton, and pretend to listen and care, making sympathetic noises and paying great respect to sacred authorities such as professors, victims, and journalists. Clintonian pretense is a compliment. Women, especially, like to be heard, and this is why Clinton did well with women. Words are more important than actions to many people.
But Bush doesn't care what people think. He doesn't care what supposed experts say, or the New York Times, or Harvard men, or the State Department, or the CIA, or even voters. This is the real cause of Bush hatred. His Christianity feeds into this. If a Christian pleases God, it is easier for him to displease The World. People hated Luther because he didn't care what the Church or Councils or Fathers said, if it conflicted with the Bible. Bush's Texanness feeds into this. Texans aren't supposed to care what intellectuals think, or, indeed, anybody but themselves. Bush's Yaleness feeds into this. I know this from experience. Going to Yale, or Princeton, or Harvard inoculates you from being impressed by credentials. Nobody else can outcredential you except someone from Oxford or Cambridge (and Rhodes Scholars don't count-- we knew them too well at Yale). Even if you were, like Bush, an average student at Yale, you know how silly the top students can be, and the mere credential does not impress you. If you have been a businessman, you learn to be even less impressed by credentials. That is upsetting to the many people in America who live by their credentials.
[ permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.12.08b.htm ]
To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.