Hillary W. Bush
At first glance, you wouldn't think there was much the same about Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Presidential resident George Bush, other than the fact that they both have approval ratings well south of the Mendoza line. On the face of things, they seem like polar opposites.
She was driven from early adulthood to over-achieve on her way to greatness. He was driven by daddy's limo from an extremely late adolescence to greatness' doorstep. She's a mainline power junkie. He's a recovering alcohol junkie. She went from being a Goldwater Girl and President of the Wellesley Republicans to being a moderate Democrat. He went from being a goldbricking pilot and head cheerleader at Phillips Andover to being a Born-Again Conservative Republican.
But the similarities are also very striking. Both owe their shots at the Presidency to being related to recent Presidents. If George Bush were just plain George Smith, he would never have been elected dogcatcher. (If he were George Bailey, Clarence would never have gotten his wings.) And if Hillary Clinton were still Hillary Rodham, she might be deeply ensconced on K Street as a lobbyist, but she'd never have had a sniff of Pennsylvania Avenue, at either end.
Both build inner organizations based on loyalty as the overriding virtue. The vaunted secrecy and loyalty of George Bush's inner circle may actually be eclipsed by that of the group known as "Hillaryland." This cohort, composed exclusively of people - mostly women - who worked for either or both Clintons during their White House years, is noted for its fierce, protective loyalty to Hillary. Just as in the Bush White House, that loyalty trumps competence, as is seen by the choice of Maggie Williams to be campaign manager, despite the fact that she's never run any campaign nor yet any enterprise of this scope and complexity before.
Apparently being a First Lady's Chief of Staff magically confers unrelated experience just like being First Lady does.
Both Clinton femme and Bush fils maintain a stubborn insistence that they are winning when they are, in fact, getting their asses royally kicked by scrappy insurgents. Both expected a cakewalk in their respective enterprises - one to be greeted as a liberator, the other to be acclaimed as his heir apparent. When that didn't happen in Iraq, or in this campaign, "victory" just kept getting redefined: WMDs morphed into Saddam morphed into Democracy just as delegate count has morphed into popular vote has morphed into the "important" states.
If real goalposts moved as much as these metaphorical ones, a football field would be just twenty yards long.
At the bottom of it all is a sense of entitlement, arrived at by different varieties of hubris. Bush's exaggerated belief in his own self-worth stems from being the privileged scion of a privileged family tracing its roots all the way back to the Plymouth Colony. Clinton's father was the son of immigrants, and hopped a freight to get to Chicago for his start. Hers is a sense of personal entitlement, rather than familial. Meritocracy versus Aristocracy.
In their differences, as in their similarities, we find that Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush are two sides of the same coin.
Sunday, a friend of mine pointed out an article in the Chicago Tribune that was written in anticipation of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the U.S. In relevant part, it reads:
"A central theme of Benedict's Papacy has been his argument that reason without faith leads to materialism and selfishness, while faith without reason leads to fundamentalism." (h/t Junie Sinson)
This is the crux of the Clinton/Bush dichotomy. Hillary's "me first" and "anything goes" mentality is due to having reason without faith. She triangulates unmercifully, repositioning herself wherever she needs to be, secure in the knowledge that wherever she is, she's right. She can rationalize anything in service to herself.
Bush, on the other hand, has a deep and abiding faith in his rectitude. Having chosen a path by whatever passes for mentation with him, he follows it blindly to its end. He has no need to rationalize it to himself or to anyone.
Hubris, whatever its origin, was often the hamartia, or fatal character flaw, which doomed the protagonists in Greek tragedy. In their most damning similarity, the contrasting hamartia of Clinton and Bush led them each to make the same tragic mistake in 2003. Bush pushed for war with Iraq because he believed beyond all reason that it was the right thing to do. Clinton voted for Bush's war because she selfishly reasoned that to vote against it would hurt her chances of becoming President regardless whether the war was right or not.
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little bit of faith can be more so. But a lack of either is deadly.
