November 14, 2004 in Features

Sadly, it’s four more years of recklessness

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It’s the kind of night any Inland Northwest lake-lover understands: The family’s reckless older brother takes over the wheel of the boat and the younger kids in the hull squeeze their eyes tight.

Doro Bush Koch told the Washington Post her story back in 1999. She remembers those heart-stopping night rides when her big brother, George W., climbed behind the wheel. It wasn’t like when her brother Neil drove the boat, because, well, Neil knew what he was doing. “George, on the other hand, it was more of a kind of wild, risky thing because we’re not sure that he, you know, could manage the boat as well,” Koch said.

The election has ended and it’s now clear: George W. Bush will drive this national power boat for the next four years. Americans need to grab a life jacket. We’re stuck with this headstrong daredevil at the helm, and there’s not much, short of impeachment, that we can do about it.

The morning after the election, I arose to a bleary-eyed Don Imus imparting the news. The sun began to shine that day, and I comforted myself with the sure and certain knowledge that never again will I wake up to learn that George W. Bush has been elected president. I celebrated that fact for at least a week.

But as the glow of denial wore off, I, along with my friends and extended family from North Carolina to Spokane to Beijing, plunged into a rocky sea of emotion. We’re revolving through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief at head-spinning, e-mail-enhanced speed.

This week there’s the dawning awareness, if not yet acceptance, that Bush will be driving this boat through the dark night of the next four years, and we’re all stuck here alongside him. When the rash arrogance of unbridled narcissism grabs the helm, we’re in for four more years of careening emotions, volatile politics and danger.

The hopeful vision I held of John Kerry placing his hand on a Bible on Inauguration Day, his wife Teresa beside him, continues to haunt me even as it begins to vaporize. I just can’t quite let it go.

Kerry struck me as eloquent, smart and presidential. He conveyed gravitas, the necessary depth and insight to lead wisely, and a sorely needed sense of emotional stability and calm.

I can’t believe so many American voters see these men so differently than I do.

Bush appears trapped in the emotional state of a 2-year-old. Those are the years when a little boy reigns supreme, a charmer one minute, a miniature, blustering boss of the world the next.

I look back at Bush’s growing up years, and wonder just what Barbara and Poppy were up to when little W was 2. How did his emotional development manage to stop so soon?

That Washington Post profile from 1999 lends a few clues. In 1948 Barbara Bush packed up her 2-year-old firstborn and flew with him from her native New England to Odessa, Texas. There they moved into an apartment, the Post notes, with a bathroom shared with two prostitutes next door. George Sr. worked as an oil drilling equipment clerk, making $375 a month. The family transferred briefly to California, where Bush’s sister Robin was born, then it was back to Midland, Texas.

Apparently in the moves and upheavals during that time, Barbara and Poppy just plain forgot to rein in their boy. He appears to have inherited his mother’s headstrong, in-your-face temperament, and perhaps no one managed to mention that he wasn’t the boss of the world. Now he’s become one.

I don’t want a brash, impulsive leader deciding whether to draft my nephews or to name Supreme Court judges that will limit my daughters’ reproductive freedom. I fear the effect of George W. Bush’s psyche on our own.

The presidency has an enchantment about it, a power to project an attitude and a style that American culture adopts. Bush’s leadership style — one of aggressive, bull-headed dominance — will likely continue to pervade our churches and workplaces for the next four years.

As I have throughout the campaign, I exchanged e-mails with my parents about the election results. My father in South Dakota voiced a conciliatory note, made easier, I imagine, by the fact that his vote had just helped run Tom Daschle out of the Senate.

He sounded perplexed, though, about how the religious right had come to usurp not only his church but his Grand Old Party. He’ll stay in both, he said, partly because he was there first.

“These are very serious folks and not to be taken lightly,” he said. “I think it will take quite awhile before the pendulum swings back to something more normal.”

He concluded, “Now you know how I felt when that lying, immoral S.O.B. Clinton was elected twice.”

The personalities of each our presidents affect us profoundly. When the country elected a free-wheeling optimist, stocks in largely imaginary companies soared. When the country turned to a brash daredevil, the world suddenly began to explode.

We deserve someone who brings out the best in us, yet we’ve got a man likely to stir up four more years of anger, grandiosity and fear.

Doro Bush remembers her big brother with a baby sister’s awe. Perhaps last week it helped explain how he managed to dazzle 51 percent of Americans.

“We all idolized him,” she said. “He was always such fun and wild, you always wanted to be with him because he was always daring … He was on the edge.”

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