" When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?"
—John Maynard Keynes
History records that George W. Bush became a "rancher"
in 1999, buying
a spread outside Crawford, Texas, shortly before
announcing his presidential
candidacy. Before acquiring the place, with its
oddly immobile round bales,
Bush showed no interest in country life. On working
ranches, most of the hay
has been fed to cows by March; on Rancho Bush,
it provides a picturesque
backdrop for TV correspondents. This president
rides golf carts, not quarter
horses. When they say he’s "clearing brush" by
hand in the August heat, my
guess is he’s watching baseball on satellite
TV. Either way, it’s a good bet that
those cows he patted at that Houston rodeo were
the first he’s touched since
attending the same event during the 2000 campaign.
He’s a Texas cliche, an urban millionaire who
buys livestock to certify his
authenticity. If Martha Stewart had grown up
in Dallas, she’d market
designer branding irons, and Bush would buy them.
That said, cowboy
imagery has been politically useful to Bush and
could prove so again,
unless presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry
learns to counter it.
In the iconography of the Hollywood cowboy movie,
real men are real
simple. Guys who give complicated explanations
are womanish, indecisive
and untrustworthy. Making a virtue of necessity,
Bush plays the
straight-talking man of action to great effect.
It’s basically how he
gets away with so many falsehoods without being
seen as deceptive.
Never mind that better westerns like "Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance
Kid" and Clint Eastwood’s "Unforgiven" have played
against this
stereotype for a generation. Or that Kerry is
an authentic war hero
running against a guy who plays one on TV. As
an Eastern intellectual
who talks like a book, Kerry risks coming off
like Jimmy Stewart to
Bush’s John Wayne in "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valence."
Kerry shouldn’t underestimate Bush. Inarticulate
at times, he delivers
scripted lines with great conviction. He’s got
a particular knack for
sarcastic putdowns. Having reportedly resented
people like Kerry—sons
of privilege whose achievements match their pedigreessince
his own New
England prep school days, Bush effectively mocked
his rival in remarks
at a Dallas fund-raiser widely replayed on TV.
"The [Democratic]
candidates are an interesting group with diverse
opinions," Bush said
with a smirk. "For tax cuts and against them,
for NAFTA and against
NAFTA, for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot
Act, in favor of
liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that’s
just one senator from
Massachusetts."
OK, so two of Bush’s four examples are brazenly
false. Kerry voted
against Bush’s millions-for-millionaires tax
cuts, correctly predicting
that they would blow a hole in the federal budget.
And "liberating Iraq"
never came up for a vote. It became Bush’s fallback
position after
Saddam Hussein’s "weapons of mass destruction"
turned out to be a
figments of neo-conservative imagination.
Kerry explains his October 2002 vote giving Bush
something he already
had, the option to use force in Iraq (the U.S.
bombed Saddam regularly
under Bill Clinton) as a response to the president’s
vow to build an
international coalition, respect the U. N. arms
inspection process and
make war the last resort—promises he says Bush
broke.
What Kerry can’t say, of course, is that to the
degree his Iraq vote
reflected political calculation, Bush made it
so: scheduling a war vote
before a congressional election, as his father
refused to do in 1990.
The other two charges are almost as phony. Kerry
doesn’t want to repeal
NAFTA. He wants the U.S. to enforce environmental
and worker safety
rules, which trade rivals gain a competitive
advantage by ignoring. As
for the Patriot Act, with its problem with Fourth
Amendment guarantees
against unreasonable search and seizure, Kerry
explains his vote as an
emergency response to 9/11.
For Kerry and others, what made parts of the Patriot
Act supportable
was a "sunset clause" limiting its duration to
three years, forcing Congress
to revisit its most troubling aspects, such as
secret searches. Bush now
portrays that review as unpatriotic.
The White House pulled a similar bait-and-switch
with tax cuts, getting
them enacted by affixing expiration dates it
now calls tax increases.
But see, even a terse refutation of Bush’s charge
that Kerry is an
unprincipled flip-flopper takes quite a few words.
To win, Kerry can’t
simply defend himself. He must take the offensive.
Writing in Slate,
fellow Texan Will Saletan argues that the bait-and-switch
argument—Kerry
calls Bush "the biggest say-one-thing, do-another"
president ever—won’t
cut it. People don’t believe that cowboys lie.
Instead, he argues that
Bush’s real weakness is his near-theological
certitude, his bull-headed
inability to admit error, perceive contrary facts
or change his mind.
Having got the herd moving in the wrong direction,
he’s too stubborn to
turn around. Personally, I’m not sure about the
argument, but I do love
the metaphor.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.