If you haven’t seen this video that’s been making the rounds this week, you really should. Right now, the poor server is completely overwhelmed, but keep trying until you see it. (Update: if that link doesn’t work, you can also try this one.)
I’ve heard for some time that George W. Bush used to be an articulate, knowledgeable public official. Not in the distant past, but just 10 years ago, when he first ran for governor. The Atlantic’s James Fallows talked to some Texas journalists a few months ago who found Bush more than capable in 1994:
Yolette Garcia, who as the executive producer at KERA-TV, in Dallas, had supervised negotiations for the Bush-Richards debate, says that in those days Bush was noted for his poise and ease in public appearances — including the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid as President. “You never saw him in an awkward situation as governor,” she told me. “You expected he’d know the right thing to say.”
[…]
“It would never have occurred to me (or anyone else who dealt with him at the Capitol) to think of Bush as dumb or lacking gravitas,” Paul Burka recently wrote in Texas Monthly, about Bush’s bright early days as governor. “He was both fluent and knowledgeable about the things a governor needed to know.”
It’s one thing to read that Bush was articulate; it’s another to see it with your own eyes. This video shows some clips from Bush’s first gubernatorial debate in 1994. What I saw completely blew my mind.
This is hardly the same man. This Bush was eloquent, sharp, and well-informed. He was, for lack of a better word, impressive as a candidate. It’s no longer a mystery to me as to how this Bush was able to beat a popular incumbent governor (Ann Richards).
But it is a mystery as to what’s happened since.
I’ve been watching Bush pretty much every day since late 1999, when he started to run for president. The differences between the Bush I know and the Bush I saw in the 1994 video are more than just striking; they’re astonishing. The problem, of course, is that Bush didn’t get better as he gained experience, he completely fell apart.
’94 Bush understood public policy; ’04 Bush is frequently confused. ’94 Bush spoke without obvious grammatical mistakes; ’04 Bush has frequent trouble with subject-verb agreement. ’94 Bush spoke quickly and succinctly; ’04 Bush is slow, stumbling, and defensive. ’94 Bush had clear ideas that he articulated in crisp, complete sentences; ’04 Bush is, well, the Bush we know all too well.
The maker of this video chalks up the quick deterioration of Bush’s verbal skills to the early stages of dementia. I’m not buying that at all. That said, Bush’s obvious decline happened incredibly quickly — let’s say, six years (’94 campaign to ’00 campaign) — and it’s not unreasonable to wonder what on earth happened to him.
Fallows showed a video of the ’94 Texas debate to George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in political communications.
When I invited him to watch the Bush-Richards tape, Lakoff confirmed that everything about Bush’s surface style was different. His choice of words, the pace of his speech, the length and completeness of his sentences, all made him sound like another person. Even his body language was surprising. When he was younger, Bush leaned toward the camera and did not fidget or shift his weight. He arched his eyebrows and positioned his mouth in a way that, according to Lakoff, signifies in all languages an intense, engaged form of speech.
No matter what your opinion of the president or his policies, it’d be impossible to describe him this way today.
Putting aside possible physical/mental difficulties Bush may or may not have, there are a couple of possibilities to explain Bush’s decline from articulate governor to incoherent president.
1. Bush is faking it. Lakoff told Fallows that Bush’s change may be intentional. Bush, the idea goes, wants to prove how “down to earth” he is to help “regular” people relate to him. I don’t believe this at all. If Bush wanted to appeal to the masses, why was he so articulate in 1994? In Texas, no less, where a more-macho, less-eloquent appeal might have had more of an impact?
Bush has proven himself capable of reading a well-written speech, but embarrassingly bad at answering questions. The prior requires no creativity; the latter requires the ability to think quickly. It’s not a ditzy routine he plays up once in a while; this is who he is. If Bush is faking it, he’s the single greatest actor in the history of the world.
2. Bush is overwhelmed by the scope of the presidency. As governor of Texas (a position with limited power and few responsibilities), Bush found it easy to master a handful of key issues. The legislature only met every other year and Bush rarely had to address anything outside of a limited policy agenda. A president, meanwhile, has a lot to remember and it’s just too much for Bush to handle. As a result, Bush comes across as incompetent. This seems plausible.
Or maybe there’s something else altogether. All I know for sure is that I’ve never seen a public figure make such a dramatic change in such a short period of time. I know there’s no polite way to ask the president, “So, what happened to you?” but I wonder how Bush would explain the transformation.