2001-02-05 (Monday, 09:26:31)

THE WORD FROM W.

George W. Bush's First week as President of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good. It was by far the best Inaugural Address in forty years; indeed, it was better than all but a tiny handful of all the Inaugurals of all the Presidents since the republic was founded. That praise is not, or not necessarily, quite as high as it may sound: except for Lincoln's imperishable second Inaugural, scattered passages from his first and from the speeches of certain of the greats (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, one or two others), and, arguably, Kennedy's 1961 address, the Presidential Inaugural is not a distinguished branch of American literature or even of American rhetoric. To read all fifty-four addresses, one after another, is to traverse a wasteland where pomposity, banality, and incoherence are more often relieved by mediocrity than by brilliance.

The speech Bush read was different. It was tightly constructed. Its rhythms flowed pleasingly. Its sentences were sculpted. Its sentiments, however familiar, were expressed in language that was consistently fresh, at once elevated and unpretentious, and almost entirely free of bombast, cliche, or sloganeering. By the "We're No. 1" standards of patriotic speechmaking, the version of the American civic religion it set forth was without arrogance, and its admissions of imperfection abjured scapegoating. Its description of America as a "slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom" was a cleansing acknowledgment of America's original sin. In affirming that what binds America is not "blood or birth or soil" but "ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds," and that "every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American," it rejected nativism and deftly sketched both the relevance and the limits of multiculturalism. And consider this passage, outstanding but by no means atypical:

In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love.

Here the cant phrase "at risk" is freshened by juxtaposition with "at fault," making the point that the origins (and, by extension, the pathologies) of poverty are rooted more in social than in personal responsibility. In substance if not in expression, it was a speech that, with five minutes of blue-penciling, could as easily have been delivered by the rightful winner of the election. Bravo, then, to its author, the former journalist Michael Gerson, and to Bush himself for recognizing its merits and protecting it from the "improvements" that were no doubt suggested by other members of his staff. ("It's gotta mention missile defense! It's gotta say the words 'compassionate conservatism'! That was the theme of the whole campaign!")

The dissonance began one day later. The new President's first act was an act of cruelty. He ordered an end to federal assistance to overseas organizations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, that, in his words, use taxpayer funds "to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion." These organizations do no such thing, or course; nor, by law, can they. The federal money they receive is used for family planning--that is, to prevent unwanted pregnancies (and therefore to reduce the occasions for ending them). Nor do these groups promote or advocate abortion, though the clinics they operate sometimes use private funds to provide abortion counselling and services. Bush's order is calculated to placate his pro-life supporters, while avoiding the political storm that would ensue if similar restrictions were imposed at home. (The underlying logic--that public money "frees up" funds that might otherwise be devoted to purposes of which some taxpayers disapprove--is not likely to deter the Administration's plans for aid to "faith-based" organizations.) "Where there is suffering, there is duty" were among Bush's inaugural words. His inaugural act will increase suffering by shirking duty.

The President spent the rest of the week promoting his proposals for improving education and for a hugely regressive tax cut. The former was the subject of some of his speech's finest passages, the latter of its one descent into grossness: a pledge, high-fived by the crowd on the Mall, to "reduce taxes, to recover the momentum of our economy and reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans." Bush's "education package" is expected to amount to some ten billion dollars a year. Meanwhile, his income-tax cut would confer more than thirty billion dollars a year on the richest one per cent. His abolition of the estate tax would funnel another thirty billion a year to the well-off. Nearly half of that would go to an average of twenty-four hundred families a year. The economics columnist Matt Miller has calculated that each of these sets of heirs would get an average windfall of $6.2 million--a reward not for effort, enterprise, or work but simply for having been, like Bush himself, born rich.

This, so far, is the context of the Inaugural Address, and where speeches of this kind are concerned context is all. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," F.D.R. said, on March 4, 1933. But, if his programmatic response to the Great Depression had been limited to making psychotherapy tax-deductible for anxious stockbrokers, that great line would be little remembered. What President Bush does, not what he says, will determine whether his speech ultimately redounds to his credit, or only to Michael Gerson's.

-- Hendrik Hertzberg
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 5, 2001