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Posted on Tuesday 8 January 2008


With time running short on his presidency — and on the eve of a trip to the Middle East — President Bush seems to have overcome his aversion to talking about his legacy and is now speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered. As it turns out, the president sees himself as quite the heroic figure.
  • "I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions."
  • "When he needed to be tough, he acted strong, and when he needed to have vision he understood the power of freedom to be transformative."
  • "I would hope that they would say President Bush respects my religion and has great love for the human – human being, and believes in human dignity."
  • "liberation, by the way, not only from dictatorship, but from disease around the world, like HIV/AIDS or malaria."
  • "that he hurts when he sees poverty and hopelessness" and "that he’s a realistic guy."
Bush’s self-image contrasts sharply with his image among his fellow Americans. More than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the job is doing, and a CNN poll in November found that 58 percent of Americans rated Bush either a poor president, a very poor president, or the worst president ever. Bush’s view of himself is particularly delusional as he heads to a region that remains traumatized, angry and distrustful on account of Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, his antagonism of Iran and his perceived crusade against Islam.
I am incapable of disagreeing with Dan Froomkin. He was such a voice of comfort in the period before everyone else caught on to what was happening in the White House. But I will at least offer an alternative to a Messiah Complex to explain these absurd statements. In the 1930’s, Helene Deutsch, one of Freud’s early colleagues, described a group of people she called "as if" personalities. They were people who on first meeting seemed to be full of the stuff of personality, but turned out to have taken on the mantle of a persona, but not the substance. Their seeming fullness was more "as if" than real – "a spasmodic, if skilled, repetition of a prototype without the slightest trace of originality." "Another characteristic of the ‘as if’ personality is that aggressive tendencies are almost completely masked by passivity, lending an air of negative goodness, of mild amiability which, however, is readily convertible to evil" [a bad temper]. Recall this narrative:
It was the day before thanksgiving, November 1973. Things were quiet enough at the Republican National Committee for the chairman to spend a few minutes on parental logistics. His eldest son was taking the train down from Harvard Business School and would need the family car for the weekend. Would the young aide deliver the car and the keys to Union Station? Years later, the aide describes what happened next in the kind of sunlit, slo-mo tones they use in movies. "I’m there with the keys and this guy comes striding in wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a bomber jacket," he recalls. "He had this aura." Which is how 22-year-old Karl Christian Rove met 27-year-old George Walker Bush.
"… this guy comes striding in wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a bomber jacket" sounds like the cool guy of 1973. Harvard Business School sounds like the prerequisite for a young up-and-comer of the same era. But then, jet pilot had sounded pretty good in 1972. What Deutsch was onto is what are now understood as disorders of the self – the ways people deal with an absence of self definition and a firm identity sense. Such people take on the trappings of a personality – become "as if" they are some way of being, without the inner stuff of that way of being – thus, Bush’s confusing history. Bush even talks that way. In one of Jon Stewart’s classic Daily Show routines, clip after clip has Bush beginning a speech with his saying what his mission in the speech will be, "I’m here to comfort those of you who have lost family in Iraq." etc. He defines himself first, then delivers his speech [badly].

So Froomikn’s quotes are things that sound like what Presidents say. They’re no more delusional than anything else Bush has had to say in the last however-many years. He’s not playing God or Messiah. He’s not really even playing President. He’s playing person. To confirm his as-if-ness, compare your emotional response to his speeches to your reaction to Hillary’s tearing up today, or Obama’s powerful post-Iowa rhetoric, or McCain’s confrontations of Romney [notice I didn’t mention Romney himself]. There’s someone home in there. With George W. Bush, not so much…

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