One mustn't be misled by Eric Alterman and Mark Green's title, The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America. Unlike the shelf of recent titles that juxtapose "Bush" and "lies," this volume is not an anti-Dubya screed. Indeed, the authors are polite; they assert mildly that the 43rd president "frequently dissembles." And so they stay above the ad Texasem insults and the snobbish preoccupation with malapropisms that cheapen so many critiques of the Oval Office occupant. Their book is not for partisan hacks; it's for partisan nerds. It offers a fiercely footnoted assault on the incumbent's policies while barely putting a scratch on the man himself.
Yet while the authors have elevated their tone, they haven't expanded their reach. This is not a gospel to make converts, but rather a hymnal for the choir. And that should come as no shock; Alterman is a columnist for the Nation, and Green, an original Nader's Raider, was the Democratic nominee against Michael Bloomberg in the 2001 New York mayoral election. From their port-side perspective, they can find neither plausibility nor popular appeal in the administration's policies -- which means they can't adequately answer the question "If Bush is so bad, how come he's so far ahead?"
We might start where Alterman and Green start: with Bush's energy and environmental policy. From their Manhattan vantage point, they see the administration as one big oil slick of special interests and dirty deeds. They deride Bush's platform as "talk globally, harm locally." They seem particularly wounded over the president's kiboshing of the Kyoto global warming treaty, and yet they neglect to mention the most obvious fact about Kyoto, that the treaty was unacceptable to elected Democrats as well as Republicans. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to reject the treaty even before the Clinton administration could submit it -- which, of course, it never did. So beware, Democratic nerds seeking to use this book for your next appearance on "Crossfire": The authors will not help you anticipate the best comebacks from the Republican nerds. Other chapters, with too-clever-by-half titles -- "Déjà Vu-doo Economics," "When Laissez Isn't Fair" -- are similarly one-sided. They argue that Bushonomics is a "proven failure" at creating jobs but never come to grips with the changes in the cyber-economy that have made the decline of manufacturing jobs a quarter-century-long trend. And by the way, would enacting the Kyoto treaty pump up employment in Michigan? Yet even the authors are forced to concede (kinda, sorta) that Bushonomics has done O.K.: "In the short term, President Bush's stimulative policies . . . should produce the illusion of adequate growth for his 2004 election."
Alterman and Green laid a trap for themselves when they set out to write a comprehensive critique of all Bush policies, on everything from AIDS to the World Trade Organization; not all Bush policies are equally vulnerable to attack. The authors complain, for example, that in the wake of Sept. 11 Bush reversed the Clinton policy of "presumed disclosure to one of presumed closure," without ever acknowledging the longstanding bipartisan concern over the spillage of nuclear secrets into the public domain -- and into foreign hands. On other occasions, they drift into generalized attacks on the Republican Party as a whole. Is it really Bush's fault -- or even Karl Rove's -- that Republican activists allegedly tried to suppress the black vote in Maryland, Arkansas and Louisiana?
It's not until the last half of the book, as the authors shift from domestic to foreign policy, that their criticism rises above the level of advanced-placement Democratic National Committee talking points. Indeed, Alterman and Green are at their most effective when they merely remind the reader of what Bush has had to say about the doctrine that bears his name, such as, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." That's not in my Bible; the words sound more like those of a Jesus-freaked Rudyard Kipling carrying a very big stick. To be sure, some readers will savor those Michael Gersonesque words and praise God for Bush's moral clarity. But others will agree with the authors, who suggest that the Bush Doctrine is a "formula for endless war in the service of a global empire."
In The Book on Bush's view, the only folks who should like the Texan are "extremist elements of the Republican Party -- the religious right, Fortune 500 CEOs, especially those from the oil patch, and neoconservative ideologues." Yet plainly, his support is much broader than that, and by the last page the reader is still wondering why that could be so. About the closest the authors come to answering the question is their jibe that "the conviction that God is his copilot has saved Bush a great deal of time and worry as to how to proceed."
Today, most polls still show that a majority of Americans want Bush to continue on as their pilot. And this tome -- Manhattan's revenge against Midland -- is not likely to change that electoral flight plan.
