Paul Burka Says The Darndest Things

Texas Monthly April 2006: Behind the Lines

Two years ago, I confessed in these pages to being ambivalent about voting to reelect George W. Bush. After the past six months, I'm even more so.

Umm, Paul ... George Bush will not now ever have to worry about a single vote for re-election.

This reminds me of the endorsments offered by many of the major Texas newspapers for George Bush back in 2004:

Austin American-Statesman:

The judgment of the president and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Rumsfeld?s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has been clouded at times, and if Bush wins a second term, changes are certainly in order.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz need to go. Changes at the top of the Defense Department hierarchy would signal not weakness but a commitment to break from the mistakes of the past three years. The young people bearing the brunt of the burden and their families who share that burden deserve no less.

Houston Chronicle:

The United States faces severe problems at home, as well as abroad. The Chronicle implores Bush to use a second term, if voters grant him one, to regain the bipartisan spirit on which he based his earlier success in Texas.

One way to do that is to broaden his range of advisers. Bush recently told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the war on terror had caused him to live inside a bubble that shielded him from outside voices. In Texas, one of Bush's principal mentors and allies was a Democrat, the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. The Bush administration and Republicans in Congress are not solely to blame for the partisan rancor that prevails in Washington and across the nation. Given a second term, however, Bush would be in the best position to foster cooperation.

Update those datapoints with Paul Burka's belated realization that George Bush, the President, is not the same George Bush we saw as Governor of Texas:

The time has come to put my cards on the table?or, I should say, put them on the table again. It?s no secret that I have always found a lot to like in George W. Bush. I thought he was one of the best governors this state has ever had. I have spent my entire adult life watching Texas politics, and only two governors measured up as great leaders, John Connally and Bush. They could work with the Legislature and push it further than it wanted to go. Bush was able to work with Democrats as well as?and on some issues, like tax reform, better than?Republicans. When he decided to run for president, he could legitimately position himself as ?a uniter, not a divider? and a ?compassionate conservative.? I want him to succeed as president. I voted for him in 2000, with enthusiasm, believing that he would turn out to be the same kind of leader as president that he had been as governor. I was wrong. By 2004 the politician I had known as Governor Bush had all but disappeared, to be replaced by a stranger named President Bush, who bore little resemblance to his alter ego. The president was a divider, not a uniter. He placed himself in thrall to the extremists in his own party.

In February of that year, I wrote a story about the president under the headline ?The Man Who Isn?t There.? The missing person was Governor Bush, an effective, competent, engaging, uniting centrist. An image of the president appeared on the cover, accompanied by a single word: ?Maybe??an expression of my ambivalence. In the conclusion, I explained why I would vote to reelect the president despite the concerns I had set forth in the article: ?It will really be Governor Bush who gets my vote. Why? Because hope springs eternal: my hope that in a second term, free from worries about reelection and with an undisputed electoral victory, he will reappear after a four-year sabbatical. I?m betting he?s still around; we just haven?t seen him for a while.? Snake eyes!

In trying to reconcile the two Bushes, I have come to realize that there are at least two similarities?and this is bad, not good. One is a narrow focus. Governor Bush picked out a few issues and pressed for their passage, leaving the rest of the field to the Legislature. This was good politics, and it also suited his personal style; the things he cares about he really cares about, while the things he doesn?t care about (in Texas, these included higher education and the environment) aren?t even on his radar screen. As governor, he didn?t like to make a big deal of disasters, because it seemed like profiting politically from human misery. But when you?re president of the United States and the Mississippi coast is in ruins and New Orleans is under twenty feet of water, you?d better care about it, and the country will notice if you don?t. In the CBS poll, 64 percent disapproved of his response to the needs of Katrina victims. Understandably, Bush?s main concern since September 11 has been national security, as it should be. But I wonder whether one of the consequences of Bush?s intense focus on the war and terrorism has enabled Cheney and other ideologues in his administration to expand their influence over policy areas that the president cares less about.

The other worrisome trait is his management style, which as governor consisted of surrounding himself with people he trusted (the ?iron triangle? of Joe Allbaugh, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove) and taking positions (on such issues as clemency, managed care, and air pollution) that he never rethought in the face of criticism or changing circumstances. This worked well in Austin, where his agenda and the agenda of his aides were one and most of his policies weren?t controversial, but it isn?t working in the White House, where his advisers are Washington lifers like Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who have their own agendas, as does Rove, whose zeal to create a permanent Republican majority sometimes does Bush a disservice by forcing him to kowtow to his religious-right base (Terri Schiavo, stem cell research). I?m hardly the first to suggest that the president has isolated himself in an ever-constricting bubble of confidants from which those with contradictory opinions are excluded. It could still be fixed. Go outside the bubble to talk to elder statesmen who have the national interest at heart?starting with your own father. Call on James A. Baker, who saved your presidency at the very start and might save it at the end. Colin Powell, who was a prophet without honor in the first term. Joe Lieberman. John McCain. Listen and learn. Send Cheney on a two-year world tour of state dinners and fact-finding missions. Get a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the generals. That?s my dream, but this time I?m not betting on it.

Of that excerpt, I'd take issue with the notion that George Bush was able to prod the Texas lege further than it wanted to go. Maybe Burka has some other issue in mind when he says that, but I keep recalling Bush's failure to establish a broad-based business tax - a failure that our current Governor has struggled with the most unimpressive of ease to resolve.

The rest merely qualifies as still more Texas media rambling about "what Bush should do, even though everyone else in the world knows damn well he'll never do." Fire Rumsfeld? ... Fire Wolfowitz? ... Regain the bipartisan spirit? ... de-isolate himself?

Yeah, right. I'm not the most cynical person in the blogosphere, but it doesn't take much of this wishful, pointless meandering of ink on the part of the press to bring out what cynicism there is to the fore.