[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Getting Junior's Goat

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Getting Junior's Goat

October 7, 2004
 By MAUREEN DOWD 



 

How strange that George W. Bush had his appointment in
Samarra: his commanders taking a stand against the
relentless Iraqi insurgents, trying once more to turn the
corner in a war with endless corners. 

Mr. Bush is reminiscent of the protagonist of "Appointment
in Samarra," by John O'Hara - Julian English, the son of a
WASP-y, aristocratic, renowned, ineffectual father.
Julian's pals were "the spenders and drinkers and socially
secure, who could thumb their noses and not have to answer
to anyone except their own families." 

Bristling with filial tension and nurturing the chip on his
privileged shoulder, the son refuses to follow in the
proper father's footsteps and instead engages in, as John
Updike put it, "impulsive bellicosity," falling into a
self-destructive spiral that starts when he throws a drink
into an ally's face at the club. 

O'Hara prefaced the novel, his most brilliant, with a
quotation from Somerset Maugham about the futility of using
a reverse playbook to avoid your fate: The servant of a
Baghdad merchant runs into Death at the marketplace and
gallops off as fast as he can to Samarra, thinking Death
will not find him. But, it turns out, their appointment is
not for Baghdad on that day, but for Samarra that night. 

W. has rocked the nation and the world as he gallops fast,
frantically trying to avoid his dad's electoral fate. 

He no longer has to chafe at his father's imposing shadow.
If he wants to go to war with Saddam without even
discussing it with his dad, he can. If he wants to keep his
dad from having a speaking slot at the Republican
convention, he can. 

Even though the president, waving off any attempts to put
him "on the couch," refuses to acknowledge any Oedipal
sensitivities, John Kerry artfully drilled into the sore
spot in the first debate. 

Senator Kerry evoked the voice of Bush 41 to get under 43's
thin skin. The more Mr. Kerry played the square, proper,
moderate, internationalist war hero, the more the president
was reduced to childish scowling and fidgeting, acting like
a naughty little boy who refuses to sit in his seat and eat
his spinach and do all the hard things a parent wants you
to do. 

"You know, the president's father did not go into Iraq,
into Baghdad beyond Basra," Mr. Kerry said, as W. blinked
and burned. "And the reason he didn't is, he said, he wrote
in his book, because there was no viable exit strategy. And
he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile
land. That's exactly where we find ourselves today. There's
a sense of American occupation." 

Mr. Kerry told the now-and-then Guardsman about the
"extraordinarily difficult missions" of our troops in Iraq:
"I know what it's like to go out on one of those missions
where you don't know what's around the corner. And I
believe our troops need other allies helping." 

Playing the Daddy card was part of the Kerry makeover by
the Clintonistas - Bubba eye for the Brahmin guy. 

In their '92 debate, Bill Clinton used the same
psychological trick to rattle Bush 41. Objecting to the
Republican pinko innuendo about a trip he had taken as a
young man to Moscow, Mr. Clinton reminded the first
President Bush that his father, Senator Prescott Bush of
Connecticut, had stood up to Joe McCarthy: "Your father was
right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack
my patriotism." 

The Bushes get very agitated when confronted with the
specters of fathers who made them feel that they never
measured up. 

And even though Mr. Kerry is more of a stiff loner than
Poppy Bush, they share enough - that patrician, dutiful
son, star of the class and the playing fields, hero on the
killing fields, stuffed résumé, Council on Foreign
Relations, multilateral mojo - that he can easily get W.'s
goat. 

It was a sign of how unnerved W. was that he had to rely on
his own dark, foreboding and pathologically unapologetic
surrogate Daddy, Dick Cheney, to clean up his debate mess
and get the red team back in the game. 

The vice president shielded the kid by treating John
Edwards as even more of a kid. 

Mr. Kerry may take on the voice of Daddy Bush again in
Friday's domestic debate, pointing out that W.'s father
tried to fix the deficit, rather than mushrooming it to
$415 billion. 

The Clintonistas have infused the Kerry campaign with a new
motto: "It's the couch, stupid!" 

E-mail: liberties at nytimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/opinion/07dowd.html?ex=1098173942&ei=1&en=dd71e1d0035a2815


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