Like many of you, I suspect, there are so many demands on my time that there's not a lot of opportunity to read books. Magazine articles, newspaper stories, endless web publications, and ever-growing amounts of e-mail--yes. But ploughing through all that leaves precious little time for more leisurely reading.
Yesterday, however, an extended wait in the doctor’s office offered me the opportunity to make a serious dent in a book I’d wanted to crack open for weeks: “Bush Country,” by author and New York Post columnist John Podhoretz.
Podhoretz is an unabashed admirer of President Bush. The book thoughtfully lays out the case why he believes Mr. Bush “has earned a place in the pantheon of great American chief executives,” to borrow from the dust jacket. At the same time Podhoretz outlines his case for presidential greatness, he hilariously examines why Mr. Bush simultaneously is “driving liberals insane.”
Unless you run across this stuff, you might not know that their loathing for him extends far beyond conventional policy differences. As they did to his father, they accuse President Bush of everything from soup to nuts, often in conspiratorial language that ranges from the merely bizarre to the completely unhinged.
In many ways the most intriguing chapter is the first. Podhoretz digs up the roots of the odd notion that President Bush is unintelligent.
On its face this is a real head-scratcher. President Bush, after all, earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard (and, by way, scored a 1200 on his SATs).
What’s fascinating is now that Mr. Bush has overcome his earlier habit of occasionally mangling words--the shaky basis for the meanspirited putdown--his enemies simply re-tooled their allegation. President Bush, they airily insist, is not “intellectually curious.”
None of this is remotely true, as Podhoretz and a number of other authors have amply documented. The President is a highly intelligent, incredibly focused man. His prodigiously disciplined style of governance is a product not only of his temperament but also a reflection of a keen insight into the labyrinthine legislative process and the Chief Executive’s unique powers.
As pro-lifers, many of us have followed Mr. Bush’s career in public office carefully, going back to when he was governor of Texas and before. None of us doubted his resolve, his intellectual heft, or his commitment to the cause of unborn babies and the medically dependent.
What we appreciated then and now is Mr. Bush’s uncanny capacity to reach out to ordinary people–those tens of millions of men and women who go about their daily lives with only a half-cocked eye on politics. Checking in as they do only periodically, the citizenry senses in Bush steely determination, firm convictions, but also a willingness to treat those who disagree with him agreeably.
That is not an attitude returned in kind by his opponents, as Podhoretz documents in excruciating detail. That most assuredly includes abortion advocates.
It’s fascinating to me how frequently pro-lifers overlook how much closer the overwhelming percentage of the American people is to our position than to the death peddlers'. As I’m sure many of you have, I’ve learned in other contexts (especially in lengthy dialogues with sincere skeptics) that there is a vast number of people who are imprisoned, so to speak, in a “personally opposed” cell.
That is where President Bush’s genius comes in. By his initiatives he erects a kind of half-way house for those whose minds are tired of pro-abortion cant but who have yet to completely free their minds.
In a sense, he is echoing great counsel: “Come, let us reason together.” Like a compassionate teacher, Mr. Bush is patiently asking Americans a series of probing questions.
Each one of these offers them a way to begin to escape the “personally opposed” trap. It can be as a gentle and unassuming as saying to the states, go ahead, if you want, and include the unborn in your prenatal care programs beginning at conception.
It can ask people necessarily harsh questions: is it acceptable to you that abortionists plunge surgical scissors into the backs of nearly-delivered babies, suck out their brains, crush their skulls, and deliver dead what was minutes before a vibrant, living member of the human family? Or, if a pregnant woman is criminally assaulted and her unborn child is injured or killed, do you really believe there has been only one victim?
But ultimately, these and many other inquiries are all variations on a theme: do you believe there are any circumstances in which unborn babies deserve legal protection? If your answer is no, why? If your answer is yes, why?
To borrow a metaphor from someone whose name now escapes me, these various strands will not automatically weave themselves into a meaningful whole. They require “the loom of an argument” to give them meaning.
That is what President Bush, along with you and I, are doing. Contrast this with the “logic” of abortion, which grows ever more threadbare by the day.
By gentle persuasion and with a sympathetic ear, the President is gradually reconfiguring the debate over the status of unborn children. As a result, everyday and in every way, the emotional and intellectual timbre of the debate is changing.
And that is in large part due to the work of pro-life President George W. Bush.
Like many of you, I suspect, there are so many demands on my time that there's not a lot of opportunity to read books. Magazine articles, newspaper stories, endless web publications, and ever-growing amounts of e-mail--yes. But ploughing through all that leaves precious little time for more leisurely reading.