Eloquence

Mark Steyn, in his latest column compares the "romantic eloquence" of Reagan with Bush and their overall world-views. In some ways, Bush's rhetoric has had to be tempered by the times that we live in, and Steyn thinks that this has hindered the ability of the Administration to get people to understand the nature of the conflict in which we are involved.

But, in the broader sense, Barnett might be right — that the very name of the war was its first polite evasion, the product of a culture which has banished the very concept of ‘the enemy’. From grade school up we’re taught that there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated. One sympathises with Bush’s difficulties: in the early days, every time he tried to name an enemy, he got undercut. When he denounced the Taleban, Colin Powell said, au contraire, we’re very interested in reaching out to moderate Taleban. So Bush switched to the more general term ‘evildoers’, and crossed his fingers that Powell wouldn’t go on Meet the Press and claim the administration was interested in reaching out to moderate evildoers.

Three years on, I think one can make the argument that this fuzziness about the precise nature of the enemy is one reason so many Americans have checked out of the war. The President is getting his way, in Iraq and at the UN. But at home he doesn’t seem able to package it all into a great cause the way Reagan did. I mentioned two years ago that ambitious presidents take advantage of extreme circumstances — the way FDR did in the Depression. Bush had an opportunity to shift the broader cultural landscape in 2001 — to take on the enervated, self-loathing, multiculti self-absorption that in the days after 9/11 looked momentarily vulnerable. But he chose not to do so. Unlike Roosevelt, he declined to seize the moment.

But even FDR couldn’t have done it without the help of Wall Street and bread lines. What makes Reagan the most impressive president of the century is that he shifted the landscape without any external assistance — no Depression, no 9/11, no nothing: like the Queen and Comrade Bishop, everyone was in ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ mode vis-à-vis the Soviet Union as it gobbled up more and more real estate. Reagan got a notion to win the Cold War at a time nobody else had. And he made it happen.