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What Is It About W?
I actually sat through the Bush press conference yesterday. The experience reminded me in some ways of that November night in 1972 when Richard Nixon's disfigured face appeared on the television to gloat about his trouncing of the honorable George McGovern.

Bush exhibited the same intense disdain for the press as he called reporters by their last names and facetiously accused David Gregory of "stealing" the White House silver. There was that same curious combination, exposed by tone of voice and body language, of a President who is both arrogant and insecure as he struggled twice to retrieve the word "commensurate" when his brain kept delivering "commiserate." When his mind failed him, he thought a weak bluff would suffice given the power bestowed upon him by his name, his office and augmented by the momentary boost provided by the capture of family enemy Saddam.

Yet Bush is anything but another Nixon. Nixon was shaped by the poverty of his family and his sheer physical unattractiveness so that he viewed the world, even when he became President, from the perspective of a fearful outsider. He believed that the power of his intellect and ruthless guile could compensate for his deficiencies and enable him to overcome the advantages wrought by wealth and beauty in American culture.

Bush represents all that Nixon struggled against. Where Nixon was always articulate when discussing even the most complex foreign or domestic issues, Bush ventures into uncharted territory when he dares to use words of more than two syllables. Where Nixon's every mistake threatened to cast him into outer darkness, Bush has failed over and over again in life only to be rescued by his powerful family and its friends. Where Nixon learned about the hardships of life in the pre-New Deal capitalist America, Bush has always enjoyed the advantages bestowed upon the born-rich....