Truth - Al Franken [25]
The New York Times reported two days later:
Mr. Bush’s advisers said that the president had anticipated the line of inquiry at the news conference.
One adviser said the White House had examined polling and focus group studies in determining that it would be a mistake for Mr. Bush to appear to yield.
Not only did the Times article shed new light on Bush’s “no mistakes” fumfer-thon, it also illuminated two other exchanges in the same press conference. Asked how he felt about dwindling support in the polls for his misbegotten war in Iraq, Bush responded:
BUSH: And as to whether or not I make decisions based upon polls, I don’t. I just don’t make decisions that way.
And, a few minutes later:
BUSH: If I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I’d be pretty ineffective. I know I would be disappointed in myself.
By the Republican National Convention, the doctrine of presidential infallibility had grown to mythic proportions. And no one’s nose was browner than the well-proportioned snout of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. On that first night, when Giuliani won the Mortality Salience Award by mentioning terror forty-one times, he also related an anecdote that combined both the unabashed Bush-worship and the histrionic dishonesty that undergirded so much of the campaign’s rhetoric. Speaking of, of course, 9/11, he said:
At the time, we believed we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Spontaneously, I grabbed the arm of then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said to Bernie, “Thank God George Bush is our President.”
And I say it again tonight. Thank God George Bush is our President.
When Giuliani said that, I was watching from the floor of the convention there in Madison Square Garden with my radio producer, Ben Wikler. Spontaneously, I grabbed his arm and said to Ben, “He made that up.” And as would later become clear, I was right.
Giuliani’s bestseller, Leadership, had opened with, as Publishers Weekly described it, “a gripping account of Giuliani’s immediate reaction to the September 11th attacks.” Given Giuliani’s well-known political ambitions, you just know that his book would contain any story that would please prospective Republican primary voters. For example, on page ref, he wrote: “I thought it so important that George W. Bush defeat Al Gore that I campaigned for Bush even during the course of my radiation treatment for cancer.” But the “Thank God George Bush is our president” line, which would make headlines when Giuliani used it at the Republican Convention, was nowhere to be found in Leadership. In fact, the name “Bush” makes a total of zero appearances in the twenty-eight-page “gripping account” of that fateful morning.
I know from experience that a smart author never leaves out a dramatic and/or self-serving anecdote. For example, you’ll notice that, above, I related the anecdote about grabbing Ben’s arm and telling him that Giuliani made up the anecdote about grabbing Kerik’s arm.
Kerik, whom Giuliani would recommend to be Bush’s director of Homeland Security, had set up a love nest in an apartment across the street from the World Trade Center site that had been donated for the use of weary rescue workers. He had been grabbed many times near Ground Zero, it seems. But never by Giuliani.
Wrestling with the fear triggered by the Republican Convention’s 116 prime-time references to terror or 9/11, the viewing public was in desperate need of a charismatic leader who could restore them to “psychological equanimity in the face of death,” as Terror Management Theorists Cohen, Solomon, Maxfield, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg put it in “Fatal Attraction: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Evaluations of Charismatic, Task-Oriented, and Relationship-Oriented Leaders.” Summarizing the ideas of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, they wrote:
For terror management