Has the New York Times been reading posts by an independent voter named TMV whose main thread for several years has been George Bush’s unprecedented role as a president who uses political polarization as a strategical and tactical tool? This editorial titled “The Great Divider” sounds like it:
As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.
The Times details some of the conflicts between reality and Mr. Bush’s version of how we’re doing in the Iraq war.
In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.
Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
Of course, we’ve written here that lame or not Kerry, as a presumably professional politician, should have known better than to provide Bush and the GOP with such a tasty political gift. It was the equivalent of political negligence and should make Democrats think long and hard about whether they really want to entrust their party’s national fortunes to someone who doesn’t seem to politically “get it.” But the Times looks at the loftier issue. And then:
But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.
This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.
It doesn’t sound like it’s his style.
And the sad part is, there are Americans who are willing to instantaneously discard their own long-held values, former policy goals and even political ethical standards to go along with, be silent about or/or enable this kind of political behavior from the person who leads their party.
Because he leads their party.
Yet polls suggest those numbers are shrinking, even among Republicans, as political descendants of Barry Goldwater and political admirers of the first President George Bush reportedly begin to abandon ship.
Is the most glaring example in modern history of the old idea of “divide and rule” on the brink of finding out Tuesday that this tactic is no longer sure-fire — but perhaps back-fire?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.