He is starting his visit once again on friendly turf, with lunch Thursday with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and then a bilateral meeting and dinner with Prime Minister Tony Blair at Chequers. Blair has been noncommittal on missile defense. And he has sided with Europe on the Kyoto global-warming treaty, which Bush rejects. But except for the quaint linguistic differences of “elevators” vs. “lifts,” Bush believes that the Britons speak his language.
President Bush may have a rude awakening. It’s not just that his comments this week will be held up to the Queen’s English, but to the subtleties of diplomatic talk. His aides dismiss the nuanced language of diplomacy as “diplobabble.” But Bush is slowly learning that every minor thing he says as president has major implications. The press corps puts his mixed-up grammar and invented words down to everything from stupidity to a folksy style to some kind of dyslexia (from which one of his brother’s suffers). During the campaign, his malapropisms were funny. Now that he is the leader of the free world the joke is wearing thin.
It isn’t mixed-up words (“preserve” for “persevere,” “arbitrary” for “arbitration”), however, that have gotten him into trouble in foreign affairs. It is another verbal tendency he has of saying whatever is on his mind without always thinking through the ramifications. His defenders would argue that there is an honest frankness to George W. Bush. His detractors say that this “straight talk” can upset delicate situations. During an interview with ABC during the China spy-plane crisis, Bush did away with decades of “strategic ambiguity” by telling a TV reporter that the U.S. would absolutely come to Taiwan’s defense in case of a Chinese attack. Previous presidents have relied on circumlocution on this issue.
In one sentence, without notifying Congress, Bush changed our stated China policy. Bush aides insisted that this had been our unspoken policy all along, that the comment was well thought out, even planned. But others put it down to verbal slippage. “Bush is strangely frank about himself,” writes Mark Crispin Miller in his new book, “The Bush Dyslexicon.” “His body language bellows his uninterest, his distraction, his uneasiness, his callousness; and he tends to blurt out all or part of what he’s really thinking, even as he’s trying to lie about it.”
Miller’s book-just out from W.W. Norton-is not just the usual collection of “Bushisms,” like those first compiled by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg. It isn’t just intended to make fun of Bush like “My First Presidentiary,” a book illustrated with crayon drawings that is actually quite funny without being too mean (one White House aide keeps a stealth copy in a desk drawer). Staffers giggle at it much the way they do at “Saturday Night Live’s” rendition of Bushspeak.
Instead Miller, a professor of media ecology (whatever that is) at New York University, tries to make a bigger point about our TV-addled, illiterate culture. Miller does not hide his bias: He says up front that he voted for Nader, he makes it clear that he thinks that Bush is an illegitimate leader (overtly calling the day the Supreme Court ruled on Bush vs. Gore the “Day of Infamy.”) And, of course, he thinks the press is largely complicit with corporate interests and in Bush’s pocket.
The book can read like a liberal screed. But it also perceptive and timely. His criticism about Bush’s use of language-or misuse of it-seems to bear directly on this trip, which includes two days at the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, an audience with the pope in Rome and another bilateral meeting with Putin. At Bush’s first meeting with Putin last month, he was exuberant in his praise for the Russian leader. He said that he had sensed Putin’s soul and found him trustworthy. Critics wondered how Bush could’ve found the former KGB operative’s soul during such a brief visit.
The president’s effusive verbal style with Putin is vintage Bush. As he would say, he speaks from the heart. He is an emotional man. Flying to Slovenia to meet Putin, Bush was wound up from the moving speech he had just given in Poland.
During his press conference with Putin, he seemed swept away by the power of the moment. But after the Putin summit, it seemed he should have been speaking more from the head. Just days after Bush and Putin traded knowing nods of understanding and family stories, the Russian leader slammed Bush on missile defense.
Bush seems to want the personal connections his father developed with world leaders so badly that he is trying to force a kind of intimacy. He also badly wants to move our relationship with Russia into a new era, where we are no longer enemies. Bush’s fans compare him to Reagan. Miller disagrees.
“We … heard repeatedly that this Bush represents the Second Coming of the Gipper,” Miller writes, explaining that many dismissed Reagan as “just an actor.” “It is precisely Reagan’s histrionic talent that this president lacks. He is unable to feign ‘presidentiality’ or put on gravitas.” Bush may grow to have gravitas the way Bill Clinton did. He has a chance on this trip to tone down his emotional bursts and his candor and learn some more “diplobabble.” Maybe at lunch Thursday, he’ll even get a grammar lesson from Queen Elizabeth.
