Saturday, 08 November 2003

You're no Ronald Reagan: It's rare that I have an opportunity to actually see Dubya giving a speech; when it's "prime time" in Washington, it's late morning in Sydney, and I'm usually at work. But we were relaxing in our Singapore hotel room when Bush made his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, so I watched the entire thing for once instead of just catching the sound bites.

My first impression was that Bush is (still) not a very good public speaker—which made his attempts to invoke Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, all the more discordant: Verbally, Dubya is to Reagan what a karaoke singer is to Aretha Franklin. I'm always painfully aware that Bush is reading from the TelePrompter when he speaks; his words sound wooden and hollow, rather than having the resonant force of heartfelt sincerity. For all I know the inner Dubya is pouring his heart out, but the only line that sounded that way was "Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country or that people or this group are ready for democracy, as if freedom were a prize you win from meeting our own Western standards of progress." For the last half of that one sentence, Bush sounded angry and scornful; for the rest of the speech, lifeless.

Delivery aside, Bush's attempts to portray himself as a latter-day Reagan continue to wear thin. Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, criticized at the time as bellicose and unproductive, has since been recognized as a direct challenge to the very idea of communism; in hindsight, it was a well-timed blow to the foundations of a teetering structure. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech gingerly avoided confronting Saudi Arabia, the largest backer of state-sponsored terrorism, and called out lesser evils instead. Reagan built up America's military, and raised its morale; Bush has dulled the sharp edge of America's sword on an ill-prepared and under-resourced Iraq peacekeeping mission. Reagan worked for and won the support of our European allies; Bush told our allies to go hang before 9/11 ever happened, and has missed every opportunity to get them back on board.

Ronald Reagan didn't reach back a mere two decades for his claim on America's legacy, either: He invoked William Penn and Thomas Jefferson and the Pilgrims' vision of America as the shining city on a hill. Consider this line from Reagan's 1982 speech to the British House of Commons:

We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.

Reagan used the language of the Declaration of Independence; by comparison, the equivalent line in Bush's 2003 speech is a limp echo:

And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

Bush did made a passing, oblique reference to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill near the end of his speech ("From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster&hellip"), so I suppose that counts for something. But Reagan was much, much more effective than Dubya at motivating and inspiring the American people. Bush's speech frankly reads like a checklist, and spent far too little time on what should have been his main subject.

For decades our Mideast foreign policy has been motivated by a love of stability and the cheap oil it produces; whether the average Iraqi breathed the sweet air of freedom wasn't high enough on our priority list as recently as 1991, when our armies stopped on the border and left the Kurds to their own devices. (Again.) Now, when Bush is explicitly renouncing the policies of his father (and Clinton, and Reagan, and just about every other President this century), and extending to the Middle East the promise America made the world in 1776… his speech only mentions those points as an afterthought.

Reagan would have done better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 3:00 pm. comments.