Rallying the 9/11 Myth

Subbing for Josh Marshall at TPM, Matthew Yglesias has a good post about the legend of Bush's heroism on 9/11. He writes,

In particular, the centrality of 9/11 to Bush's political persona has always struck me as under-analyzed. It's a strange thing primarily because Bush didn't really do anything on 9/11 or its immediate aftermath. Terrorists hijacked four planes and sought to crash them into buildings. They succeeded in doing so with three of the planes. Thousands died. The physical destruction was enormous. It was terrible. But it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. The passengers on one plane downed it before it could reach its target. Many people were evacuated from the World Trade Center and their lives were saved. But none of the good work that was done on that day -- and there was some good, heroic work done -- was done by the president or had anything in particular to do with him.

Rather, the good vibes about 9/11 Bush all, in essence, relate to a series of speeches he gave in the days following the event (his immediate evening-of speech was poorly receieved). And I think they were good speeches. The rubble/bullhorn event was a good event. The address to a joint session of congress was great, too. But what does that all really amount to?

This is a good point, but it's still overly generous to Captain Bullhorn and insufficiently generous to the American people generally and Democratic partisans more specifically. First, it must be remembered that 9/11 only happened because Bush fell asleep at the wheel. Condi gave him the infamous Daily Briefing (PDB) from the CIA on August 6, 2001, the one titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." and offering predictions that Osama would target NY and DC, hijack some airplanes, and try to blow some stuff up. Neither one of them gave a damn. They did nothing. Not one red flag, not one shaken tree, not one additional security measure. Bush just went fishing and took a nap. Literally! Then when the first plane hit, an oblivious Bush continued on with his hectic schedule of reading books with children. When they told him the second plane hit, he continued to sit in that classroom for nine minutes, looking like the most clueless monkey on earth.

He didn't recover for days. His next response, the more considered one that followed his initial shock, was to run and hide. They flew his plane all over the country and tried desperately to avoid NY and DC. Asked why Bush was behaving like something less than a man, Ari Fleischer told reporters a baldfaced lie: the White House had reports that the terrorists were targetting Airforce One. They also said that Bush really wanted to go back to DC, but the Secret Servicve wouldn't let him, implying that he works for them rather than them for him. Oops. Bush's early speeches over the first two days were national embarassments. He looked confused and weak, like a frightened child about to burst into tears and hide under a bed. Probably because he was. Many of us hoped that, for the sake of the country, he'd pull himself together. That Colin or Dick--that somebody, anybody--would smack him and tell him to strap on a pair. Belatedly, he did. Unfortunately, it was clear that they were borrowed and he didn't know how to use them.

Granted, Bush gave a good speech on the rubble pile with a bullhorn. What can I say? The man's a politician, after all, and he's got a legendary PR team. But that was several days after the attack, and even Bill Clinton, who had been in Australia during a general airport lockdown, managed to get to NY more than a full day before Bush did. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush, knowing his own culpability, did everything he could to quash any investigation into his failure to prevent the attack. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, as Karl Rove plotted how to gain partisan advantage from a national crisis, Bush immediately started trying to figure out how to use 9/11 as a pretense to attack Iraq even though it was obvious they weren't involved. How do we know? His Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, and his NSA advisor for counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, told us.

So Bush didn't just do nothing helpful before, on, and immediately after 9/11. He sank below nothing. He made the situation exponentially worse. Historians will eventually record Bush's 9/11 performance (if they don't already) as one of the low points in American presidential history. The fact that, several days later, his advisors staged a rousing photo op and wrote him a decent speech can't count much against that verdict.

How then to explain the popular myth of Bush's stirring leadership on 9/11? Political scientists have had a perfect term for this for a long time now, and it always shocks me that no one ever uses it or analyzes its implications. The term is "rallying effect." In times of national crisis, the American public tends automatically to rally around the president. Doesn't really matter who he is, how he responds, or whether he was partly to blame. His approval goes up insofar as his simple possession of the office elevates him as a unifying symbol of the American people and its resolve. Carter's approval went up in the early days of the Iran hostage crisis, and Reagan's went up after the marine barracks in Lebanon was bombed, killing hundreds of American soldiers. Clinton gained in approval after the Oklahoma City bombing. The effect is usually short term. Carter's numbers went down when the Iran crisis dragged on, and Reagan's dropped too, especially when it became clear that the US had made serious security mistakes in Lebanon. The extent and duration of the boost depend much more on the size of the shock to our national psyche than they do on the president's actual behavior.

What this means is that if you want to understand the widespread perception about Bush's 9/11 "leadership" you should ignore him and look at us. After all, we're the perceivers. Our wounds were deep, and we desperately wanted to see a strong leader on the stage. We didn't care if he was a coke-addled, drunk-driving, insider-trading, election-stealing Yale cheerleader. All that mattered was that he was our coke-addled, drunk-driving, insider-trading, election-stealing Yale cheerleader. We didn't really care if he stripped naked and smeared himself with his own feces as he ran down Pennsylvania Avenue flailing his arms wildly and screaming "Please don't hurt me!" Which, come to think about it, is pretty much what he's done.

We're far enough past 9/11 that we should be able to see Bush's so-called "leadership" for what it really was: the response of a cowardly, incompetent, and opportunistic man to events for which he was woefully unprepared. The Bush performance during Katrina, of which we have been reminded this week, was not the anomaly, it was the unbroken pattern. The only lesson to be drawn from Bush's 9/11 approval ratings is that Democrats are the most unbelievably patriotic and forgiving people on earth. In a time of crisis, they were able to put aside their tougher judgments so as to stand behind a man who even then planned to manipulate their patriotism for his own partisan self-interest while sending the nation into a hellish spiral of failure, defeat, and death. Although the extraordinary selflessness of Democrats may look foolish in retrospect, it was the foolishness of people who wanted badly to rise above self-interest and rally for a united national purpose. Bush badly betrayed that patriotic good will. Let's rally to something altogether different this November.