Real inconvenient truths

Our failed political dynasties, Pelosi's stylish appeal and George W. Bush as Queen Victoria. Plus: The hot air about global warming.

By Camille Paglia

Read more: Camille Paglia, John F. Kennedy, Opinion, Nancy Pelosi

April 11, 2007 | Reviving the format of my original Salon column, Ask Camille, each third column will be devoted to my replies to reader letters, collected at this mailbox. I am very grateful to the hundreds of readers who wrote to welcome me back to Salon and who posed fascinating and thoughtful questions. This month's selection of letters follows.

Dear Camille,

What is your opinion concerning two people in one family running for office, as in the Bush and Clinton families? We already had a Clinton for eight years -- do we need another one for another eight years? Same thing with George and George. We didn't like the father enough to give him a second term, so how did we (America, not me personally) get stuck with the son? One per family unless we elect a king. That would help keep all the blowhards off TV -- maybe.

Reguardi,
Rosina

There may be an atavistic longing for quasi-divine kingship that surfaces in unsettled times. Especially after 9/11, with its diffuse sense of peril, we should beware of the seductive dream of the strong man or clan who will shield us from harm. Democracy is predicated on sometimes chaotic cross-talk, not on governance by fiat, the whims of a hereditary elite.

Political dynasties are mythic foster families whose princes rise and fall like flaming stars. Does it signify democracy's nostalgia for royalty? The irony is that authentic royalty, re-glamorized by Diana in the 1980s, has waned back into banality in England and everywhere else.

The American dynastic paradigm is of course the Kennedys, whose political ascendancy was engineered by their ruthless paterfamilias, Joseph P. Kennedy, a multimillionaire who financed his mistress Gloria Swanson at the peak of her Hollywood fame and who lived to see the start of the chain of tragedies suffered by his children. From its charismatic height in the truncated presidency of John F. Kennedy (whom I campaigned for as an adolescent), the Kennedy mystique has gradually dissipated -- through the overrated, opportunistic Robert F. Kennedy and the scandal-plagued Ted Kennedy to the aimless JFK Jr., an amiable Adonis who finally succumbed to the family curse.

George W. Bush, as his father's son, was certainly given the benefit of the doubt by the Republican power brokers who settled on him as their party's 2000 nominee. His hearty, back-slapping persona seemed to promise gritty realism and populist outreach -- an advance on his father's Northeastern country-club effeteness. But George W.'s stunning managerial failures should warn voters away from repeating the dynasty error. Political savvy is clearly not genetic.

With the Clintons, in addition to the interesting gender difference, the dynastic link isn't generational but spousal. It used to be alleged, on sketchy evidence, that Hillary had the more promising political career, which she put on hold to follow Bill back to his native Arkansas after they had met at Yale Law School. But though Hillary may have strong policy views, her gut-level political skills are erratic, and she has relied heavily on her husband and consultants in running her campaigns. The one program she has ever directed, National Health Care Reform, she bungled badly.

If women as a group are to advance, it is critical for female politicians as prominent as Hillary to mount serious campaigns for the highest office. So what Hillary is doing is important, even simply to draw a road map for future female aspirants. But it's up to registered Democrats (including me) to decide whether Hillary is in fact suited for the Oval Office or whether her talents are more tailored for a Cabinet role, such as secretary of health and human services.

Dynasties can be a crucible of political education. For example, the young John F. Kennedy profited from the practical experience of his mother's side of the family: Her father was a legendary mayor of Boston, John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. Running national campaigns in the United States, with its huge territory, is a complex business. Hillary has certainly benefited from her husband's mastery of this process. But in trying to beat back the unexpected challenge from Sen. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton's activities as a backstage advisor and fundraiser have become excessively aggressive and intrusive.

Is it in feminism's best interests for a woman leader to be so overshadowed by a man? Shouldn't the first woman president get elected and govern on her own? What that might look like was suggested last week in Nancy Pelosi's controversial Mideast junket.

Despite legitimate concerns about whether a speaker of the House should be creating ambiguity about American foreign policy, I thought Pelosi looked fabulous -- crisp, stylish, graceful and warm yet authoritative. It was a step beyond Condoleezza Rice's commanding but steely Amazonian aplomb. And it was a world away from Hillary's stiff, guarded, sanctimonious unease, which her toothy smiles and barking laugh never quite conceal.

Pelosi is as hard as nails and is no man's puppet. Whatever her affronts to diplomatic protocol (Democrats wouldn't want a Republican speaker doing that to a Democratic president), she gave the best seat-of-the-pants performance yet of what a woman president might look like.

I found your summary analysis of the Bush-Cheney relationship to be insightful, as well as your reporting of Bush's mannerisms at the Latin American summit. What manner of conversionary event did Bush go through to be this way? His father and grandfather were elegant Eastern diplomats and proud of their fine schooling. [George H.W. Bush] previously had no less a life event than to have Japanese and American sailors racing to where he had been downed in the ocean, with the chance that the Japanese would execute or, worse, cannibalize him. (See "Flyboys.")

GWB among anyone could be excused for his foibles, including his faltering style of speech. As we become more worldly, we grow out of our hometown accents. But W, after being in an upwardly mobile Texas suburb only since high school, carries himself around like a parody of Slim Pickens, talking of nothing more in front of the world stage than when they are going to have lunch and what will be served. Was W's conversion out of a drunken nightmare, and did he then experience being shaken by Barbara, his mother, telling him, "You aren't nowhere near gauche enough to be president?" And I guess then he had to prove them all wrong.

International diplomacy has unwritten standards of propriety. Given that Bush truly is a savvy individual, he must have a reason for wanting the Latin American crowd to dismiss him as an idiot. Perhaps his only remaining defense against such hostile crowds as he encounters everywhere he travels in the world that is not a U.S. military base is that the crowd will think that he couldn't have had active complicity in America's lack of cooperation with world opinion in all of its recent relations. Our psychosis is that we elected him because he is basically a good boy, and if he got out of line, his evil uncle would always be there to save him and us.

Daniel Helming

Thank you for this vivid overview of George W.'s rocky maturation. It captures why I pity rather than hate him (as so many of my fellow Democrats have no trouble doing). Bush's swerve away from his father's preppy patrician style has ended up, as you note, as a hammy caricature of B-movie clichés about the folksy, plain-talking Westerner. His Texas accent has bizarrely gotten more pronounced since he's lived in Washington -- a defense mechanism of reverse snobbery.

I think Bush genuinely wanted to challenge and critique the establishment assumptions of his heritage and Ivy League education, but he lacked the verbal skills to do so. And his problems were compounded by his ineptitude in making top appointments. He got not sound counsel but fantasy and folly from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- whose presence from the start signaled Bush's slack and even masochistic deferral to his father's administration.

Re: Bush & Cheney. Perhaps the simplest way to interpret this relationship is that Cheney (by controlling the VP-selection process and thereby scuttling his competitors) thrust himself into the Bush administration as its de facto prime minister, leaving GWB as the pathetic queen, a figurehead with not much to do or say but wave and speechify to the diminishing empire. Just note GWB's foolishness in his recent Spanish-speaking-nations' tour.

T. Disante

Thanks for the big laugh! You made me see Bush as a John Tenniel drawing of the aging, melancholy, reclusive Queen Victoria settled amid her voluminous skirts and crossly crocheting a doily. Not exactly John Wayne -- Bush's strutting ego ideal.

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