Awaiting the Vindication of Victory
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The stature and repute of our public figures are shaped, as I have written before, by this thing called Kultursmog. It is our political culture, a kultur utterly polluted by politics, left-liberal politics.
For instance, it renders the Clintons, as reporter John Harris hymned in a recent hagiography, “the two most important political figures of their generation.” It matters not that they are also the most scandal-prone couple in American history or that also numbered among the political figures of their generation is Newt Gingrich, the wizard behind the “Contract With America” that denied Democrats joint control of the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.
And forget not President Bush, who also is from their generation, won two presidential terms, and after September 11, 2001, completely revised American strategic thinking, introducing preemption to replace whatever was left of containment.
Then too the 43rd president has — facts are facts — led America through the third longest period of economic growth since such records began being kept. Only Presidents Reagan and Clinton have presided over longer periods of unbroken economic growth.
The way the Kultursmog glorifies its loved ones and spatters on its outcasts is done both by pumping out epithets and practicing neglect — both benign neglect and malign neglect. It simply does not acknowledge its loved ones’ failings — benign neglect — or its outcasts’ achievements — malign neglect.
Consider the elevation of Senator Clinton since her defeat. She is exalted as a female pioneer, though she played down her gender through the first part of the race to stress her leadership qualities. Nowhere in the current laudations to her will you be reminded by the polluters of the Kultursmog of her early campaign finance irregularities — and shades of 1996, from Chinese donors — the planted questioners discovered in her audiences, or the Clinton machine’s bullying of opponents. Then there were her lies about Bosnia and playing a role in the Northern Ireland peace treaty. All these scandals the Kultursmog simply neglects — benign neglect.
Yet in treating those whom the pollutants of the Kultursmog consider unworthy we see the smog’s malign neglect. In the case of Mr. Bush, where, aside from this column, have you heard of the Bush administration’s protracted period of economic growth? Incidentally, the growth continues. We have not had a recession, as economists define one, and we are not likely to have one. Instead we may be entering into a period of inflation, a problem caused by the Fed.
Nor is the president complimented for his splendid Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. No president since FDR was hit with the instantaneous violence that Mr. Bush was hit with on September 11, and most of those who now carp at his reaction are what FDR called during World War II, “back seat drivers.”
Mr. Bush’s war on terror is — though it would be imprudent for him to boast of it — a success. We have not been hit again, though no good is served by the president’s crowing about this and that, goading the barbarians to act. As for Iraq, he listened to his proven commanders, adjusted tactics, and we are now winning. In a year or so we will be pretty much out of the country, and the tyrants of the world will recognize that it is foolhardy to pull a Saddam Hussein and taunt America. This outgoing president is now being snickered at in the Kultursmog for his claims that history will judge him favorably. My guess is that he is right.
The Gallup organization reports that his disapproval rating is the highest of any prior president at 69%. Yet look who follows him, Harry Truman at 67%. When President Truman left office his approval rating was the lowest ever, 22%. At least the present president’s approval rating is at 28%. The historically innocent have no appreciation for the steep uphill climb Truman’s reputation has made. Nonetheless, the despised Harry of 1952 is the admired Harry today. Mr. Bush has reason to hope.
In the meantime, conservatives should be grateful for his appointments to the federal bench. They should admire his supply-side tax cuts, and thank him for fighting today’s isolationist currents that want to shut down free trade. When he took office we had free trade agreements with three countries. Today that figure stands at 15.
Finally take another look at our foreign policy. The president went after those who were out to wreak havoc in the land and he has succeeded. As William Shawcross, the famous British opponent of the Vietnam War and champion of this war, recently wrote: “vindicated … will be the American people, and some of their leaders. God bless them!”
Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His “The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House” has recently been published by Thomas Nelson.