Clinton & GWB43

The British correspondent Martin Walker titled his book on Clinton “The President We Deserve.” Clinton practiced leadership as it is taught by management consultants and assorted gurus. “Leadership,” in this sense, is the pseudoscience of listening to employees or customers or voters and giving them back a mirror image of themselves. It is, as the historian James MacGregor Burns puts it, a “dynamic, participatory, mutually empowering relation between leaders and followers,” and those roles are easily confused. It was possible to love Clinton’s charm in the belief that it was somehow ours. When he fell into a sex scandal, of course, voters felt betrayed. But they weren’t really betrayed. What they were was embarrassed.
Bush is another president we deserve. He, too, is often accused of betraying Americans — by campaigning as a humble man and governing as something else. But this is also wrong. Bush has governed as he promised to — with the kind of phony-demotic cocksureness that many people like in pickup-truck commercials and think of themselves as embodying. When he let it be known that he didn’t “do nuance,” it was an invitation to say: “Good. Neither do we.” But this banty self-assurance — our self-assurance — appears not such a great trait when it leads you into a bloodbath in Iraq. The feeling circulating since the election is relief — relief that this unflattering mirror is a bit closer to being taken away. It should not surprise us that this feeling is as strong among those who supported the president as among those who did not.