Bush did not issue orders. Rather, he made requests of those who had done him the honor of entrusting the office to him.
PRESIDENT George W. Bush’s inaugural address was – there is no other word for it – gorgeous. Its “call to conscience” was delivered in soaring language that an America parched from eight years of Bill Clinton’s unelevated addresses could drink in greedily and with thanksgiving for this nation’s deliverance from the prosaic laundry lists of the recent past.
Yesterday, George W. Bush succeeded as he did so many times during his campaign for the presidency – from his acceptance speech at the Republican convention to the three debates with Al Gore – in rising to a formidable challenge and meeting it with uncommon grace.
Bush has promised to bring a new tone to Washington, and it appears that changed tone will be rhetorical as well as ideological and behavioral. While the new president clearly meant by that promise to suggest his administration would not sink to the unethical depths of its predecessor, we saw yesterday that the Bush years will also be characterized by an effort to lift the presidency to its formerly exalted status by elevating the way the president speaks to the American people.
I wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan in the closing months of his administration, and the most important rhetorical rule I learned was that Reagan did not use his pulpit to order the American people around. He did not say the American people “must” do this or “must” do that. Like a great salesman, he began with the assumption that the customer is always right and that it was the job of politicians to act in accordance with the wishes of the people.
Bill Clinton loved using the imperative case – thus demanding of the nation more character than he himself possessed and more sacrifice than he himself was willing to undergo. So, too, alas, did George Bush’s father rely on the word “must” – though in his case, that was due to an inability to comprehend the president’s proper relation to the American people.
The president, after all, is an employee of the electorate, not its boss. He may be the leader of the United States, but he is not its ruler.
George W. Bush, who has spoken of the humility he will bring to the conduct of foreign policy, brought a surprisingly deep understanding of that fact to his inaugural address. He did not issue orders. Rather, he made requests of those who had done him the honor of entrusting the office to him.
“I ask you to be citizens,” he said. And in a message intended as much for those who voted for him as it was for those who oppose him, he said he sought a new civility in American public life.
This was not mere boilerplate, because the new president suggested it would take a million acts of will to achieve a new tone in Washington. “Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment,” Bush said. “It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is a way to shared accomplishment.”
Bill Clinton’s longtime chief speechwriter, Michael Waldman, argues in his book “POTUS Speaks” that Bill Clinton did not seek to reach the flights of eloquence that characterized the Reagan presidency because times had changed – that the public now demands a more direct, conversational and policy-laden form of address from its leaders.
Yesterday’s speech suggests that Bill Clinton’s refusal to speak to the “better angels of our nature” was just another element of his refusal to treat the presidency as a sacred trust to be burnished and guarded and held in solemn keeping.
In 15 powerful minutes that brought an end to the Clinton years more movingly and finally than I thought possible, George W. Bush made clear his most solemn vow is to occupy his new office with a profound sense of its glorious past and his responsibility to ensure that it has a glorious posterity.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
