A Bad Character

By Hank Edson

Recent events have me thinking about character.  Character is the perennial campaign issue the GOP falls back on whenever their pandering to the wealthy leaves them no other reason to offer the American People for voting Republican.  “We may be stealing your last hard earned nickel,” they say to us voters, “but at least we have moral strength!”  Hunh?

The False Wall Between Morality and Policy

It is bad enough that the GOP has so long succeeded in compartmentalizing personal moral character in the public eye as something completely separate from one’s positions on policies regarding the social welfare of the vast majority of voters.  For years the media has bought hook line and sinker this illegitimate segregation of the private and public spheres. 

As we all know, for example, the talking heads raged over Bill Clinton’s betrayal of his marriage as though it were the most condemnable moral turpitude imaginable even though his own wife forgave him.  When it comes to George W. Bush’s conduct in creating this war, however, few have come out in the press and held him morally accountable for the more than a million dead, the torture, and the murderous ways of his legally immunized private mercenary forces. 

I know that, in general, as mature human beings, we are supposed to separate the act from the person.  We are supposed to condemn the conduct without personalizing our political discourse.  The irony here is that the GOP’s passion for asserting that “character matters” is specifically aimed at personalizing our political discourse. 

The Republican Party, with its Karl Rove’s, its Lee Atwaters, and its Donald Segrettis, lives and dies by the personal smear campaign conducted in the name of “character matters.” 

As a progressive educator, activist, and citizen who believes in nurturing humanity by fostering dialogue rather than shutting it down with condemnations, I find it is important in times of crisis to recognize that now and then there are important exceptions to this rule. 

There is a time when a progressive must make the political discourse personal.  Specifically, that time arrives when personalizing the political discourse is required to break down the false wall separating discussion of morality from discussion of criminally devastating policy.  That time is now.

I say, Bush is a bad man.  Make all the excuses you want for him, but the final assessment of his presidency is that it has done inexcusable wrong and he deserves to be tried as a criminal, a war criminal. 

Hillary Clinton could forgive Bill, but who on Earth can forgive W.?  Who has the power to speak for the more than one million people no longer living because Bush decided to attack Iraq?  Who has the authority to speak for the entire Islamic world who now identifies with those pictures of tortured human beings having their humanity so vividly defiled by soldiers under his command?

Next time someone brings up the issue of whether character matters in the context of a political campaign, they better already be on record as advocating that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney be tried for war crimes.  Don’t speak to me about character of our next president, if you aren’t going to first address the moral culpability of our current president.

We Knew He Lacked the Character That Mattered!

As I said, all that is bad enough, but what really adds insult to the most serious injury to humanity America has committed in quite some time, is the fact that we all knew George W. Bush had no moral strength, no character, and no integrity. 

We knew it just by looking at him.  Do you remember the pictures comparing Bush’s facial expressions to those of different monkeys?  We knew when we saw those pictures, we weren’t being fair to the monkeys.

The Republican spin doctors went on talking about “how much character matters” anyway, but we all knew the truth.  I’m not speaking of just the progressives, either.  The spin doctors knew, middle America knew, the Religious Right knew, the voters in the pews knew.  Now that a million people are dead, it is time for devout believers to confess: they knew; we knew. 

They were just voting for their team.  They talked about character and they endorsed George Bush’s “Christianity” as proof of his character, but they all knew he didn’t have what they normally called character.  He didn’t have what an honest Republican meets on the street and says, “that man has good character.” 

They also knew and we all knew all about Bush’s poor grades, his alcohol abuse, his bankruptcy, his sweetheart deal as the figure head of the Astros, and the unaccounted months of absence in his military record.  Really, why didn’t anyone ever require Bush to prove his whereabouts when he was supposed to be serving our country from a cushy position states-side while thousands were dying in Viet Nam? 

They even knew and we did too that his “born again” experience with Billy Graham was phony; even Billy Graham did not remember the scene Bush described walking on the beach with Graham in Kennebunkport.  (Journalist Wyne Madsen speculates that George Bush’s real religious indoctrination occurred in a rehab joint in San Diego where he was sent in response to an arrest for Cocaine possession that was later expunged from the record and that this stint in rehab accounts for the famous gap in President Bush’s National Guard Service record). [i]

With a million dead, it is time to stop posturing about character during political campaigns and it is definitely time to stop segregating the policies a candidate advocates and the sources of campaign finance he or she accepts from discussion about his or her character. 

Character matters, but what matters more than character is honest discussion during campaign season. 

If we are going to talk about character, Progressives have to keep Republicans honest and that may require getting personal.  In the 2008 campaign, honesty requires we begin the character discussion, if we’re going to have it, with the crimes of George W. Bush.

The Education of George W. Bush

Bush’s lack of moral strength was not just evident from his physiognomy; every time Bush spoke, he broadcast his character weakness to all within receiving distance.  Recently Bush, himself reminded us just how long we have known this about him.  When he was asked last week about the increasing probability of a recession, Bush avoided the question by saying: “You need to talk to economists.  I think I got a B in Econ 101.  I got an A however in keeping taxes low, and being fiscally responsible with the people's money." 

According to a recent study conducted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes, however, Bush’s war is costing the U.S. $720 Million per day.  The Washington Post reports that with the money spent on just one day of war in Iraq, our nation could “buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity.”[ii]  Forget about the way Bush is not taxing the rich, I would say the way he is spending the rest of our cash is anything but “fiscally responsible with the people’s money.”  Bush generously gave himself an A here, but he deserves an F.  The discrepancy between his view of himself and ours is hardly new.

Not only did he inflate his “fiscal responsibility grade,” however; he also inflated his Economics 101 grade.  It turns out as an undergraduate at Yale, his Economics 101 grade over two semesters was a C-.[iii]

This recent episode reminded me of another more serious indication of Bush’s deep character flaws.  Three years ago, before Bush was re-elected, one of his professors at the Harvard Business School came forward to make clear to the public what should already have been widely acknowledged: Bush did not have the moral fiber to serve as President of our nation.

Professor Yoshi Tsurumi told Mary Jacoby of Salon.com that as a graduate student, George W. Bush “showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.”  According to Tsurumi, Bush would then respond lamely, “Oh, I never said that.”

Jacoby writes: “Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ based on John Steinbeck's novel of the Depression. ‘We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt's policies 'socialism.'  He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing. And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically.’”

Professor Tsurumi told Jacoby: “At first, I wondered, ‘Who is this George Bush?’ It's a very common name and I didn't know his background. And he was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, ‘My dad has good friends.’”  According to Jacoby, Bush scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class.

On the subject of war, Bush’s lack of character was jaw-dropping and a painful predictor of the crisis we now face under his “leadership.”  Tsurumi explained, “I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class.  Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days.  And I said, ‘George, what did you do with the draft?’  He said, ‘Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.’ And I said, ‘Lucky you.  I understand there is a long waiting list for it.  How’d you get in?’  When he told me [he got in through his father’s connections], he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed.  He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals.  He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war.”[iv]

Character matters indeed, especially in a man who likes to call himself a “war president,” but feels not the slightest twinge of conscience at forcefully promoting a war he will leave others to fight for him.  But character also matters in the voter.  We must have the strength of character to reject and condemn the corruption and hypocrisy of those who dare to talk about character as a substitute for humane and wise policy and who then use the character issue to promote a candidate whose character is as obviously flawed as that of George W. Bush.  Furthermore, when we know a man’s poor character makes him unfit to form wise and humane policy, we must not hesitate to make our progressive politics personal.  We must have the moral fortitude not to sit by while an obvious forgery is passed off in the media as the gold standard of leadership.  We don’t ever want to give a bad man again the power we have given George W. Bush.

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007

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