All hat and no cattle

For readers' convenience, I've created an index of the Kevin letters so you can see the full progress of the dialogue

Dear Kevin:

Thanks for dropping by and commenting on my post about Bush's "hard work" comments during the first debate. You're the first Bush supporter to come counter one of my political posts, and I'd like to take that as an invitation to dialogue. I dropped by your blog Strategy Revolutions, and figure that anyone wise enough to write a post grounded in the observation that pirates are cool is worth talking to.

I thought I heard a tone of puzzlement in your comment on my post --- how could I have misread the character of Bush and Kerry so badly? Since I feel equally puzzled by your reading of their character, perhaps we can reach better understanding of each other's perspectives, if not an actual agreement.

Let's talk about how we see things differently ...

There are a couple of posts on your blog which I thought were relevant to my "hard work" post. One makes a point that I think is worth making, though I don't take it as a very big criticism of Kerry per se. The other is simply astonishing to me.

Your post Why Should I Hire You? makes the worthwhile point.

This last year, Senator Kerry has not been a very good employee, if I showed up for work as little as he did, I would have already been looking for a job. The people of Massachusetts hired him, but all Americans pay his salary and I say that he needs to pay his salary back. He has been using our time to look for another job.

Point taken. This is a bit troubling. But this points to something strange about the American political process, rather than to a failing of Kerry's.

We tend to see candidates as much more credible if they currently hold elective office. But running for elective office is time-consuming, expensive ... and time-consuming because it is so expensive, since anyone running a serious major campaign has to spend a lot of time raising money. As a result, we are a nation full of mayors and state representatives running for governor, city supervisors running for US congress, US senators running for president, and so on. All of them neglect the jobs they've been elected to do. They are accountable to their current constituencies, but when they lose in a bid for higher office, they typically win reëlection to the lower office.

It's weird, and it's not quite right, for exactly the reason you say. But it's hard for me to fault John Kerry in particular for this; it's just the way things are done in this country.

Your post The Cowboy vs. The Professor, on the other hand, does a reading of the personal character of the candidates that I find amazingly inconsistent with the things I know about both men.

What John Kerry doesn't know and what the President does know is that being the President, a leader, is hard work. The President has even said so several times during the debate. Maybe John Kerry hasn't realized this yet.

Bush the hardworking cowboy?

It doesn't look to me like Bush recognizes that the presidency is hard work. Prior to 9/11, he skipped work on 42% of his days in office. Since Michael Moore pointed out this statistic in Farenheit 9/11, Moore's conservative critics have been good enough to fact-check that statistic, and it's true. Now that figure does include time off for weekends --- so Bush only missed 13% of his work days. I myself would like to get 33 paid vacation days a year; I cannot resist pointing out that it sounds sort of French. Since 9/11, Bush hasn't scaled back his vacation time much. As of April of this year, the Washington Post reports

He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

Bush taking it easy in office matches what I know about Bush the man before he took office. By his own admission, Bush didn't really grow up and get serious with his life until around his 40th birthday.

His business career doesn't inspire any confidence that he knows how to work hard or get things done. Thanks to family connections, he served at the top of a series of failed oil companies: Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Fortunately, he had family cronies to bail him out each time his companies went bankrupt, and his father was conveniently President of the United States when the SEC decided to call off the investigation of him making money on insider trading at Harken. His greatest acheivement was using his name to help to get the government to build a nice new stadium for the Texas Rangers, netting him fifteen million dollars as a partner in the deal to sell the Rangers afterward.

And let's not forget that Bush wriggled out of service in Vietnam by staying stateside in the Air National Guard --- and that the best evidence available is that he did not even serve that lighter and safer duty in full.

I'll grant that Bush's personal affinity for the cowboy style is probably mostly authentic. But is this the career of a hardworking cowboy, or a well-connected patrician, enjoying three-martini lunches? Remember, that this is a guy who was head cheerleader at the tony Philips Academy Andover prep school. I read Bush as cowboy on the surface, maybe, but patrician at the core.

To those of us who are critics of Bush, it's puzzling that his handlers have made the earthy cowboy image stick. Digby has a long, vigorous rant which sums up how we feel.

George W. Bush is a man with two faces --- a public image of manly strength and a private reality of childish weakness. His verbal miscues and malapropisms are the natural consequence of a man struggling with internal contradictions and a lack of self-knowledge. He can’t keep track of what he is supposed to think and say in public.

There is no doubt that whether it's a cowboy hat or a crotch hugging flightsuit , George W. Bush enjoys wearing the mantle of American archetypal warriors. But when he goes behind the curtain and sheds the costume, a flinty, thin-skinned, immature man who has never taken responsibility for his mistakes emerges. The strong compassionate leader is revealed as a flimsy paper tiger.

Are a few photo ops of Bush clearing brush at his ranch and giving manly hugs to firefighters who do real work actually enough to convince you that Bush is that hardworking cowboy? Are a few silly stories about manicures --- that seem, to me, to sound suspiciously similar in tone to other fabrications --- enough to convince you that Kerry actually doesn't care about the American people?

What have I missed?