Liberal Talk Radio

One question has been nagging at me since the beginning of this whole Social Security charade. What’s the president really angling for? What’s his motivation, and what the f**k is he doing?? I’ve watched enough episodes of The West Wing to know that the president shores up support from congress for any initiative LONG before the public even knows the issue’s being debated. And though I might cringe when I realize that Karl Rove has been added to a long line of distinguished Deputy Chiefs of Staff that include Josh Lyman, I acknowledge his skill as a master tactician.

And so, I can only come to one conclusion: Bush and Rove are entering their Post-modernist phase.

A buddy of mine recently said to me, “Bush always gets what he wants.” It’s true: Iraq, tax cuts, judges… George W. Bush has never vetoed a bill. The man knows how to WORK IT.

So how is it, really, that this Social Security thing seems to not be going as planned? Is this just typical second-term hubris? One more 2-term folly in a line that includes Iran-Contra & Monica? Rove and Bush are exceptionally good at learning from the mistakes fo others. Did they just not anticipate the unified Democratic opposition? I find that hard to believe. Yet they’ve been so good at dividing and conquering the Dems, that maybe they just assumed they’d be able to swing a few vulnerable moderates and brand the rest as extremist-obstructionists. Of course, after the 2004 elections, there aren’t many vulnerable moderates left. In that sense maybe Bush and Rove ARE victims of their own success.

All of this comes to me today because I just read a quote from the President, courtesy of Josh Marshall:

“The tendency in Washington is, ‘OK, Mr. President, you play your cards now and we’ll decide if we’re going to play ours. I’m not going to do that. I’m keeping them close to the vest.”

Huh?? What is he doing? B&R have masterminded all sorts of visionary hardball political tactics, from refusing to hold press conferences, to paying columnists to shill for them, to telling a veteran GOP congressman that they would hurt his son’s political career if he didn’t vote for the Medicare Drug Act. So this quote would seem to be another rung in that ladder, and escalation from the masters of political jujitsu.

Yet sometimes even masters over-reach. All great artists hit a point, somewhere late in their careers, where they just lose it. Maybe it’s all the attention, or maybe the pressure from the critics, or the need to top themselves one more time, or maybe it’s just succumbing to a haze of drug abuse. Whatever the reason, these artists, at some point, slip the surly bonds of reality and touch the face of… something else. They lose interest in creating work that is understandable, and instead begin to experiment with the form itself. They become obsessed with the process, and forget about the product. This is post-modernism.

Seems to me this is what’s going on at Camp Bush. They’ve gotten so good at what they do, they’re entering an experimental, dadaist phase. One in which the process itself becomes the end, nad not just hte means. I mean, the president flat out said, “if I tell you what I’m going to do, my opposition will know how to make their next move.” This is the new Bush: keep ‘em guessing. As if he wasn’t maddening enough. Chris Sullentrop explained this strategy a couple of months back in Slate:

How long will U.S. troops be in Iraq? Ask Gens. Abizaid and Casey. What’s the broad framework for Social Security reform? Ask Congress. Has the Iraq war improved the prospects for peace in the Middle East? Go ask the Palestinians. Every time he was confronted with a difficult question, Bush answered, Go ask someone else. You expect a press secretary or a Cabinet officer, to say, “I’ll get back to you,” or “That’s above my pay grade,” or “You’d have to ask the president.” Well, now the president has been asked. And he told us to ask you.

So are we to assume, that the President’s just kicking back, waiting for Congress to present him a plan on Social Security. Again, I’ve watched enough West Wing to know this isn’t the case. And anyway, the president has spent the last several weeks criss-crossing the country trying to win support for his Social Security plan — except that he hasn’t said what the plan is yet!!! This is just batty. And the sick part is that you know he’s just relishing the whole thing.

To return to our artist analogy, these experiments rarely work out. Think Michael Jackson in the surgical mask, Bill Joel turning to classical music, or David Byrne making visual art out of PowerPoint presentations.

Still, unlike those guys, Bush and Rove are presumably still sober, and at the top of their game. There’s more method there than madness, which returns me to my original question:

What the hell are they doing??