The Last Provincial(Let’s Hope So)

I am uncomfortable with the bomb throwing that passes for discourse in many political forums. It doesn’t matter who lobs the explosives. They can consider themselves either liberal or conservative. Amateurs should not be let loose with dangerous weapons. They have a tendency to either miss their target completely, or strike the target but destroy everything around it in the process. For instance, George Bush is not a bad man. He has simply been an atrocious President.

Yes, as we have been ushered further down an increasingly torrid road, it has become natural to peek out of the handbasket and blame the carrier. It has been easy to impute malice, arrogance, a plethora of bad intentions to the Chief Executive. However, casting aspersions at the President’s innate character remains a  specious exercise.

When the voting public finally grew tired of the Clinton excesses, they reached back to what they thought was familiar. Whenever we have had a crises or fracture in the national character, we have become desperate to escape the shifting sand for more solid ground. We shrank from Jimmy Carter’s sweater, the limitations it represented, and looked to Ronald Reagan, who promised us that even more fuel for the fire lay just over the horizon.

How many commentators have been looking for Ronald Reagan’s ideological heir to rise phoenix like from the ashes of what has become the Conservative Movement?  Those halcyon days seem as far away now as the Periclean Age. President Bush was never the vechicle to revive the Reagan Revolution. It has not been because of a lack of desire. He simply lacked, and continues to lack…….vision. Remember that word horizon? At least Ronald Reagan, for all of the budgetary carnage he wrought in helping to dismantle the Soviet Union, had a vision. He could actually see beyond the horizon and had a core belief system he could articulate  to the nation that made them want to take the journey.

Our current President has neither a core ideological belief system, nor the rhetorical skills necessary to rally our nation to the challenges it faces in a world much more complex than Reagan’s. More importantly, he can’t see the horizon, and has no curiosity concerning what lies beyond it. He has spent his life content to ride along the fencepost, and use what lies within its confines as a representation of the world outside. It is this peculiar insularity that has been the President’s biggest failure, not any innately evil character.