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PARTISAN REVIEW
This reference suggests that the widespread reporting of the Bush
administration as a failure on the domestic or economic front could be a
misreading of the record, as it would be perceived by an objective his–
tory. While it could be countered that part of governing is public rela–
tions, in the sense of controlling the perception of one's activities and
policies. Yet the presidency, as has been previously suggested, may have
lost the power to effectively control the reporting of its record.
The more general point, however, does not require acceptance of
any thesis about the presidency and the media. That is, virtuous or even
historically effective actions are not always recognized as such by the
majority of the people, just as historic blunders may not necessarily di–
minish a public reputation. History has never been a morality play in
which those who set the right course and steer by it do not run aground
in unpredictable ways. So there are many historical precedents for the
thesis that the Bush presidency has been a successful one, by reasonable
criteria, deserving of reelection, which it will not achieve.
Indeed, if it is important for a Great Power to avoid major foreign
policy errors rather than to initiate brilliant strategies - a box score with
no errors whatever by the hit or run count - the Bush administration
may well turn out to have been the
only
presidency since the 1920s
which committed no error of historic proportions. I mean by that a
reasonably avoidable error in policy whose severe consequences are felt
for decades, of the kind that can be ascribed to Carter on the destabi–
lization of the Shah, to Kennedy on the disastrous and unanticipated re–
sults of the coup against Diem, to Roosevelt on misunderstanding his
Grand Alliance with Stalin, and in a clear way to every other postwar
president.
Administrations, like persons, may often do the right thing, by moral
and practical standards, and not get credit for it. They lose.
Quentin Anderson: I
have just one thing to add. A discussion that fails
to mention the prevalence of the idea that a cause amounts to a politics
is a discussion that is incomplete. We see an awful lot of this since the
sixties, and a cause that at once asks for a wrong to be rectified and also
appears not to believe that there is anybody empowered to act is not a
politics. Politics requires a forum in which to carry on a struggle. I am
also puzzled by the Ross Perot thing. Isn't he trying to act alone as a
wholesale mediator between the public and the national interest? That
too would be an end of politics.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
I'm not sure Ross Perot could answer that
question.
