[Mb-civic] The Man in the Suit By GRAYDON CARTER

[Michael Butler]

The Man in the Suit
By GRAYDON CARTER

In response to Maureen Dowd's engaging contemplation of the sexes in her
book Are Men Necessary?, I offer the following to indicate the true
differences between the two sexes. There are the obvious: men like the Three
Stooges, women don't; men fall in love with their eyes, women with their
ears; men do not find it necessary to hold on to the neck of a straw,
whereas women do. And faced with a mechanical failure in an appliance or
some such, women are more than likely to go first into quiet hysterics and
then call in a repairman. A man, on the other hand, will tell the womenfolk
to step aside, then cast a cool, discerning eye over the inoperative
machine. He will calmly fiddle with this knob and then that one. He will
examine the wiring. He will flick the switch on; he will flick it off. And
with the machine still lying there dormant, he will stand back, confident
that he has explored every possible option. And then he will begin hitting
it vigorously with a large stick.

Which pretty much describes the administration's response to 9/11. Two and a
half years after the invasion of Iraq, the president is paying for that
stick. A Web site being linked to around the Internet shows two film clips
of him. In one, he is a charismatic, quick-thinking gubernatorial candidate
in Texas, all smiles and confidence. The other clip is more recent. It
depicts the same man a decade later, speaking haltingly, faltering over his
words, unable to get across the thrust of his argument with any sort of
clarity. The Web site argues that the president is in the early stages of
"pre-senile dementia." A bumper sticker proclaims: "Will someone give this
man a blow job so that we can impeach him?" Another entrepreneur is selling
a key fob with a digital countdown of the time left until the president
leaves office: 1,158 days, 12 hours, and 32 minutes as these words are
written. That is if the president leaves office voluntarily.

The Bush faithful cling to hope that the president can rise, phoenix-like,
from his floor-scraping approval ratings to salvage something out of his
second term. You really have to admire their optimism. The Bush
administration has plunged the country into two wars without end; taken a
budget surplus in the hundreds of billions of dollars and turned it into a
deficit in the hundreds of billions; bullied allies and enemies alike; and,
at home, shredded Medicare, civil liberties, poverty programs, and 30 years'
worth of environmental protections. Almost two-thirds of Americans think the
president is doing a poor job, and his poll numbers on issues such as
personal trust, honesty, and values are in free fall. Frankly, with all that
is collapsing around him, it's a miracle his ratings are as high as they
are.

This is the time in most presidential second terms when the commander in
chief hits the road, boosting his battered morale with crowds of cheering,
flag-waving foreigners. In November, the president took his forced smile and
twitchy hand to Argentina‹to attend a meeting of 34 nations from the
Americas‹and was met with protesters and riots. Bush has made such a botch
of things that there is no haven anywhere‹even the Canadians hate him. Well,
there is Mongolia. But like a man with a few feet of toilet paper stuck to
the heel of his shoe, the president can't seem to get away from questions
about the myriad scandals at home. Bill Maher said recently, "Mr. President
Š it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away.
Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball
team.Š It's time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy
or spaceman?"

Maher is certainly one of the most gifted political commentators of the age.
But perhaps he's wrong about this. What if the president is not the
bicycle-riding, video-golf-playing, in-bed-by-10-p.m. dimwit his critics say
he is? What if this is all a ruse? What if he is playing a game of almost
unfathomable sophistication‹and he is closer in management style to the
legendary investment guru Warren Buffett than, say, Daffy Duck? Who does
this sound like: "He makes swift Š decisions, steers clear of meetings and
advisers." It's not Bush, it's Buffett, according to a recent profile of him
by Susan Pulliam and Karen Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. His desk
"isn't littered with Š research. 'I don't use analysts or fortune tellers.'"
That's Buffett, but it could also be someone else we know. The comparisons
go on. Buffett is the second-richest man in the country‹after Bill Gates.
Bush is the second-most-powerful man in the country‹after Dick Cheney. The
Journal reported that in his office recently Buffett demonstrated "a
newspaper-throwing technique" and that he manages his operations, he says,
"to the point of abdication." To the president's critics, this all but
defines Bush's inattention to detail, on such things as the rebuilding of
Iraq and the destruction of New Orleans. And just as Buffett maintains only
17 people at Berkshire Hathaway's headquarters, the president, according to
recent reports, has closed himself off to all but a small group of
cheerleaders, all of them women: his mom, his wife, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. Hmm, perhaps the
president has been secretly reading Maureen Dowd.

Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. His books include What We've
Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a critique of the Bush administration, and
Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties (Knopf).
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER