I Cogitate

COMMENT
IT’S HIS BIPARTY
by Hendrik Hertzberg
THE NEW YORKER
Issue of 2006-12-04

According to the “Backwards Bush” countdown clock, available on the Web and in key-chain and desk-accessory form at selected novelty and toy stores around the nation, the sitting Administration in Washington will, as of this writing, be in office for another seven hundred and eighty-nine days, five hours, twenty-three minutes, and 36.2 seconds. But, if present trends continue, it’s going to feel like forever. On November 8th, the day after the midterm election, President Bush vowed to “find common ground,” “work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way,” and “overcome the temptation to divide this country between red and blue.” By way of launching “a new era of coöperation,” he announced a personnel change: Donald Rumsfeld was out as Secretary of Defense, to be replaced by Robert Gates, widely viewed as a member of the reality-based community. A day later, on November 9th, Bush had Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House, over for a nice lunch and an Oval Office photo op. “We’ve had a­I would call it a very constructive and very friendly conversation,” the President said, graciously. “We both extended the hand of friendship,” the Speaker-designate replied, graciously. “Thank you all,” the President concluded. Graciously.

While they were having lunch, the White House Press Office dropped the news that the nomination of John R. Bolton “to be the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, with the rank and status of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” had been resubmitted to the Senate. The new era of coöperation may or may not be definitively dead, but at the moment it appears to have been not so much an era as a news cycle.

The first time that John R. Bolton’s name was sent up to Capitol Hill, in March of last year, the nomination got nowhere, even though the Senate was in Republican hands. The Administration waited till Congress adjourned and then gave him a recess appointment, which will expire in January. Bolton is by all accounts a clever and energetic fellow, but cleverness is not competence, and energy can amplify vice as readily as virtue. At the U.N., Bolton has earned a reputation ­in the not very diplomatic words of sixty-four former American Ambassadors and diplomats who recently signed a letter opposing him­for “egotistical intolerance,” “arrogant actions,” and a “hard-core, go-it-alone posture” that “has alienated the bulk of the diplomatic community and cost the United States its leadership role.” (“With so much at stake, our country cannot afford to permit John Bolton to continue his destructive course during the next two years,” the diplomats wrote.) “He has succeeded in putting almost everyone’s backs up, even among some of America’s closest allies,” last week’s issue of The Economist quotes a “senior Western diplomat” as saying. To put it another way, the man’s resemblance to Yosemite Sam does not end with the mustache.

There is little chance that the lame-duck Senate will confirm Bolton and no chance that the new one will. So the Administration is toying with the idea of giving him another recess appointment (which would enable him to keep the job without drawing the salary) or naming him to a deputy position without filling the top spot (which would enable him to stay on as “acting” Ambassador without the extraordinary and plenipotentiary title). Nor is the renomination of Bolton the only personnel-related sign that Bush’s commitment to comity may have already peaked. On November 14th, the President renominated Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, a former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest and a close friend of Karl Rove, to be chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which supervises the Voice of America and other government radio and television operations aimed at overseas audiences. Never mind that last summer the State Department’s inspector general found that, among other antics, Tomlinson used his office to support a “horse racing operation” (he owns thoroughbreds), or that a year ago he had to resign from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after that agency’s inspector general caught him violating rules meant to protect public broadcasting from political meddling. On November 15th, the President renominated four of his hardest-right candidates for the federal courts of appeals: a Defense Department lawyer who has been denounced by a score of retired generals and admirals for his role as an architect of the Administration’s infamous interrogation regime; a former Interior Department attorney and mining and ranching lobbyist who sees the Clean Water Act as “regulatory excess”; a district-court judge whose decisions have been reversed or vacated more than a hundred and fifty times, an astounding record that includes two reversals from the Supreme Court­one of them in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas­in voting-rights cases; and a former aide to Senator Trent Lott who is the first federal-appeals-court nominee in a quarter of a century to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.

Finally (or maybe not so finally), on November 16th, Bush appointed one Eric Keroack to be the new chief of “population affairs” at the Department of Health and Human Services. In this post, Dr. Keroack, a gynecologist, will oversee what is called Title X, a Nixon-era program that distributes contraceptives to poor or uninsured women. Until recently, he was the medical director of a Christianist pregnancy-counselling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.” One of his odder theories makes him a sort of family-friendly version of General Jack D. Ripper. In Keroack’s case, the precious bodily fluid of concern is the hormone oxytocin, a.k.a. “God’s Super Glue.” Apparently, oxytocin is released during certain enjoyable activities, including hugging, massage, and, of course, sex. It is also, according to Keroack, the fluid that keeps married couples bound to each other. Therefore, if a young woman squanders her supply on too much fooling around, she can forget about ever becoming a committed wife. Keroack’s appointment, unlike the others, does not, alas, require Senate confirmation.

Perhaps what we are seeing is one last White House attempt to reënergize the legendary “base,” after which the new era of coöperation will resume. Or perhaps the President has simply reverted to type. Last week, he found himself in Vietnam, where the United States once fought a big, bloody, disastrous war of choice. In Hanoi, which under its nominally Communist rulers is more vibrantly capitalist than Ho Chi Minh City ever was when it was called Saigon, he was asked if the American experience in Vietnam offered any guidance about Iraq. “One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while,” he replied, and added, “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” What did he mean? That the peaceable, bustling, unthreatening (if unfree) Vietnam of today represents an American success, made possible by the fact that we didn’t quit until fifty-eight thousand Americans and three million Vietnamese were dead? Or that it represents an American failure, which would have been averted by another decade of war, another fifty-eight thousand, another three million? Who knows? And who knows, really, what this President has been taught by this month’s election? The present President Bush, after all, is a decider of decisions, not a learner of lessons. And he likes to decide that he was right all along.

 RSS feed