Savvy Jim Hoagland warns political observers not to misunderstand President Bush's recent nominations to key administration positions.
President Bush's second-term appointments confirm how important individual loyalty is to him. Even more than most, this president treats personnel matters as personal matters.But Bush's new choices for top-tier jobs in foreign policy and at the World Bank reveal another overriding priority that gets less attention. The other "L" word — legacy — goes unspoken by Bush but already shapes a hugely ambitious agenda for global change that he wants set in concrete by 2009.
The president has hidden this enormous ambition and the tools for achieving it in plain sight. He built his second inaugural address around repetitive emphasis on the word "freedom," and now is sending trusted aides out to design or modify specific policies and institutions to make the speech a conceptual blueprint for the next four years.
The nominations last week of Karen Hughes to run the State Department's public diplomacy effort and of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank should be seen in that longer-term light. So should the less publicized but equally revealing decision by Bush to give his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, a significant role in planning policies pegged to turning the lofty rhetoric on the Middle East into reality.
Judgments about the desirability or realism of Bush's grand designs for change must await future columns. But as his nominations move forward, it is important to understand that they do not represent random or unconnected choices made simply to reward loyalists. Be relieved or terrified, but realize that there is a plan at work here.
Bush himself never talks about legacy and does not encourage conversations in which the word might figure, say officials who meet with him.
Nor does he seem to mind that there is little public awareness that he is developing methods to pursue what the president's critics call madness — his obsession with spreading freedom.
Could other Bush motives account for these nominations? A perverse sense of humor? A desire to punish or destroy the World Bank or the United Nations? A taste for poetic justice slaked by condemning the talented wordsmith Gerson to try to bring his rhetoric to life?
Maybe. But count on that, and you run the risk of "misunderestimating" George W. Bush and his ambition once again.
Mark Steyn has a related take on President Bush's nomination of John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.: a shot of truth-telling, not pandering to woolly-headed notions of transnational "diplomacy."
I've never been to Davos, but I've sat next to the hot-looking Eurototty in the Alpine bar and tried to wangle me a little après-ski action and there comes a point in the evening when she says, 'Zat George Boosh. What an idiot, hein!' And you start to bristle, but then you realise that America and Old Europe are riven by as deep a divide as the magnificent plunging cleavage beckoning from her low-cut Fahrenheit 9/11 T-shirt and maybe now would be a good time for some transatlantic outreach in a very real sense, so you say, 'Yeah, Bush. What a chump. Not like that Ruud Lubbers, eh?' And you stare down her cleavage and catch your creepy sweaty face reflected in her shoes and feel momentarily ashamed, but not for long. My guess is that that's what Bill Clinton and Eason Jordan were up to when they respectively hailed the progressivism of Iranian politics and defamed the entire US military. You're with a bunch of foreigners and you want them to like you and it's easy to get carried away.Posted by Alan at March 20, 2005 02:05 PMThat's what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, 'He doesn't mean all that, does he?'
But he does. And that's why the Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism.
Tip via LGF.