George W. Bush, Weeper; Jesse's Girl

Generals fight the last war, and the professorial worldview is usually the student worldview of a generation ago. George W. Bush's arrival in Washington confirms that there's a similar time lag at work with presidents: Presidents look at the world as did the movie stars of the previous generation. If Richard Nixon was Edward G. Robinson, Ronald Reagan was John Wayne and Bill Clinton was Burt Reynolds, George W. Bush is?well, he's Alan Alda. He's a weeper.

Clinton used to cry, too, but at least we always knew he was faking it. President Bush sobs almost daily. During the presidential debates, he implied that a governor's chief responsibility in disaster relief was crying along with the victims. He wept when he nominated Colin Powell as secretary of state. He wept in the airport hangar when he left Texas for the final time last week. And in the moments leading up to his inaugural address on Saturday, his eyes filled with tears.

That the teetotaling President Bush should be so lachrymose is a bit of a surprise. Blubbering in public is something you're supposed to do less of when you quit drinking. (Some people, in fact, would call it the best reason to quit drinking.) If a president shouldn't cry, then a president in a cowboy hat definitely shouldn't cry. ("Put a dime in that there jukebox, Slim, and play me the one about the minority gal who was able to pay for her son's private-school education thanks to our voucherization initiative.")

But it's no use quarreling with the American voter. For the third consecutive presidency, we've repudiated the Strong, Silent Type that used to be the country's beau ideal. President Bush's very tears give a hint of why he has been such a tough politician. It's hard for his foes to pin down exactly who he is. (It's probably hard for him to pin down exactly who he is, but that's another article.) He's not just an emotionalist-in-chief but also an old-fashioned patriot, of the sort that grew wholly unfamiliar in the Clinton years. The speech may have been half Kahlil Gibran, but it was also half Rudyard Kipling. It invented a kind of postmodern patriotism, in which 60s-style skepticism gets aimed at American history?without, however, making the slightest dent in it.

A stupid management-consulting mnemonic gave Bush's address its form: the "four Cs" of civility, courage, compassion and character. It is tough to see how the speech could have risen above such a gimmick, but it did. Bush managed to invoke God in a way that made him sound like Jimmy Carter ("Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love") and populist self-reliance as if he were Ronald Reagan ("I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects"). President Bush meant to describe America as "a story of flawed and fallible people" who nonetheless represent the world's best hope. The line came out as "a strong and fallible people"?which is even weirder, and more pleasant. (Didn't Abraham Lincoln say that once?) "Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea," Bush added. "Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations." (Didn't Hiawatha say that once?) The effect was quite pleasing: this is about as good as an inaugural address can get without a national crisis to give it heft.

The first indication that the speech was going to be a success came in its opening seconds: the overwhelmingly Republican attendees gave a huge and uncynical ovation when President Bush thanked Bill Clinton "for his service to our nation." The cheers were so loud, in fact, that they drowned out the great lie of the speech, which followed immediately: "?and I thank Vice President Gore for a contest conducted with spirit and ended with grace." Nor was the President hurt when practically every news service covering the first hours of his administration looked back at Bill Clinton's first act as president: signing an ethics order that, he said, would make his administration "the most ethical administration in history." (Clinton undid that order just days before the end of his term, freeing his minions to take lucrative lobbying jobs this week.)

There is room to differ on Clinton's achievements, but not on his ethical standing. Clinton ranks with Nixon, Harding and Grant as having presided over one of the half-dozen least ethical administrations in American history. What made his showy ethical guidelines particularly hubristic and obnoxious is that the administration Clinton drove from office?that of President Bush's father?actually does have a fair claim to be called the most ethical administration in history. Those who worked in the first Bush administration had to attend hours-long ethics tutorials, sign contracts renouncing personal emolument from public duty, and clear all outside work with White House lawyers. This was a White House in which by far the largest scandal came with Chief of Staff John Sununu's borrowing a White House car to shop for his stamp collection. When Clinton aide David Watkins took the presidential helicopter and a military escort to go golfing in Maryland, it was a comparatively minor event, out of the news within hours.

That's not to say the Bush White House was above political tricks. Last week saw Boy George's wife go to the well for one of the Old Man's favorites. Laura Bush said in a televised interview that she opposes overturning Roe v. Wade. Dubya claims to be "pro-life," but this is not pro-life talk. In fact, if one is actually pro-life?i.e., believes that abortion is murder?then it might amount to an irreconcilable difference in a married couple.

The truth is that the new Bush, like the old one, is pro-choice in his bones, and son is following father in the same cynical double game. On the one hand, you alert the public that your wife is pro-choice, so the 90 percent of the country with common sense understands that you're not going to do anything to upset the Little Lady. On the other hand, you swear your enmity to abortion in front of pro-life groups, and trust their wishful thinking to do the rest.

Jesse's Girl

One of the major effects of abortion on American public life is that sex scandals today seldom involve children. Americans have become habituated to the "between two consenting adults" model of tryst coverage. We forget that what makes sex scandals scandals is that they always involve nonconsenting people?and not always adults.

Anyone who wants to make fun of Jesse Jackson's zipper problem or condemn him as a moral hypocrite ought first to offer his daughter a sincere and loving welcome, wishing (for her) a bright future and (for her parents) the wherewithal to provide it. But with that taken care of, we can return to Rev. Jackson's moral hypocrisy.

There were two ways Jackson could have acquitted himself like a gentleman in this matter: (1) he could have accepted the blame and the responsibility for the affair while embracing the daughter it had resulted in; or (2) he could have admitted the affair and just left it at that?saying that God's intervention through the miracle of his new daughter had made humble gratitude rather than histrionic repentance the order of the day.

The latter would have been the more logical course, not to mention a generous (and necessary) gift to his daughter. Instead, Jackson turned this into a matter of his career. "A two-year-old story was made public," he said angrily, "so one can sense that there may be some motivation." Does he mean on the part of the public? Of course the public has a motivation: curiosity! It's a curiosity that comes not just from human nature but also from the peculiarly powerful position occupied by silken-tongued men of the cloth in American society. So insatiable is the American appetite for charismatic religion that preachers of all faiths are given wide latitude as to lifestyle. The only demand the national culture places on them is that they not break the Elmer Gantry rules: You can't use the pulpit to pick up women, and you can't use it to put money in your pocket.

Jackson's story indicates he does both. But that's not the way he sees it. Jackson thought?and apparently still thinks?that he's being taken to task only because he's too good a person. His family has been sequestered over the past few days trying to figure out, in Jackson's words, "what we must do to continue to serve." (Cf. former DC Mayor Marion Barry, who similarly committed no crime that couldn't be forgiven until he tried to apologize and showed himself to have a heart too narrow for the task at hand. "I've spent so much time doing for others," said the Mayor after his crack arrest, "that I have not worried enough about caring for myself.")

Democratic Congressman Rod Blagojevich of Chicago has proved a particularly sycophantic exponent of this too-loving-to-think-about-himself reading of Jackson. "Because Reverend Jackson responded in such a responsible and forthright way," Blagojevich said, "I believe that, when the smoke settles, his political position and his moral leadership will be preserved."

Oh, yes, very forthright! Jackson didn't acknowledge his daughter until two years after she was born, when it became clear that the National Enquirer was about to publish an article. As Jesse muttered last weekend, "Someone said a saint is just a sinner who got back up again?" Yeah? Who said that? Al Capone?

I Literally Exploded

Just when the Ashcroft confirmation hearings were beginning to look like a weeklong charade of television-level banalities, the local (Missouri) interest in the man's career surfaced to provide comic relief, through the agency of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Dispatch's man in Washington, Jon Sawyer, tried to describe Ashcroft's obstruction of federal court nominee Ronnie White, and committed what is thus far the Mixed Metaphor of the Third Millennium. Sawyer's story opened: "Missouri Supreme Court justice Ronnie White survived the klieg-light cauldron of a wrenching Senate hearing Thursday ?"