Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the attacks, is still at large. There has been surprisingly little outrage in America over this fact. While politicians still debate the threat that Saddam Hussein may have posed to our nation, here we are dealing with a man who is indisputably dangerous - and nowhere to be found.
For the most part, the media has let the president off easy. To understand why, we go LIVE to Orleans with NBC's Brian Williams.
Alright, I lied, I can't do that. However, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina less than a month ago, I believe President George W. Bush revealed his most important professional strategy to the nation. Asked by Williams about his summer reading choices, Bush replied with a knowing smile, "The key for me is to keep expectations low."
Aha! I had long suspected that Bush was a bit wilier than he let on. Like a toddler who gets off the hook for spilling grape juice on the rug, Bush's exaggerated ignorance almost convinces you that he simply does not know any better. Our president realized early on that he would be better off keeping his bar set low, and from that moment on he has never looked back.
Having low expectations changes the scale of accountability. If the media is always reporting on your grammatical screw ups, mispronunciations and general ineptitude, then the story will be that much bigger when you do something right and that much kinder when you make a mistake.
Look at the CIA leak scandal. While the names of Karl Rove, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Richard Armitage have been everywhere, Bush has successfully maintained a certain distance from the affair. Even the civil lawsuit filed by the exposed CIA agent, Valerie Plame, points fingers at Rove, Libby, Armitage and Dick Cheney, but not the president. Is it really possible that Bush's closest adviser, his hyper-involved vice president and the number two man at the State Department (Armitage) were all involved with the leak, but that Bush himself was ignorant of the matter?
This is highly unlikely, but the mainstream media has for the most part implicitly excused Bush of any wrongdoing. "This is Dubya we're talking about here; we can't expect him to have control over his closest advisors, his vice president, and the higher ups at the state department." Keeping expectations low is a simple strategy, but clearly very effective.
How does Bush maintain such low expectations? It ain't no accident, as the president might say. As leader of the largest English-speaking nation in the world, it would seem necessary for Bush to speak proper English and use it in his public appearances. Instead, he purposely mispronounces important words like nuclear. This is no accident. If the president came off as one of those sharp-as-a-whip intellectuals who can correctly pronounce words, the public would raise its expectations of all of his actions. Instead, his carelessness with the English language prompts potential critics to think he simply don't know no better.
Another way Bush maintains low expectations is by claiming an objective is impossible while simultaneously promising to work toward achieving it. The most obvious case of such doublethink is the "war on terror." On Aug. 30, 2004, Bush stated rather bluntly that "I don't think you can win (this war)," but that you can create conditions that make terror "less acceptable." Bush was right. We cannot defeat terrorism, no matter how hard we try. As Robert Dreyfus wrote in Rolling Stone, "Terrorism is a method, not an enemy." Bush creates a war we are no longer expected to "win," when this was clearly impossible from the beginning.
If there are low expectations of victory, a war's critics will be easily hushed when they condemn the length or brutality of it. Interestingly, Iraq is different because the president actually raised expectations for this messy adventure arguing we would be greeted as liberators and promising weapons of mass destructions. No wonder it took critics significantly less time to punish Bush for Iraq than for his other blunders when none of these expectations were met. Bush has learned his lesson, though, reverting back to the "low expectations" strategy and declaring that we will be operating in Iraq indefinitely.
Unfortunately for the president, even low expectations can be too high. Now he finds himself in a truly complex - and some say impossible - situation in Iraq and a similarly messy situation in Louisiana and Mississippi, where his relief efforts have clearly been failing. Soon the media may even question Bush's ability to ever find Osama bin Laden. With approval ratings dipping into the 30s, one can only hope that our president is finally feeling the heat from a public that expected him to safeguard the lives of Americans both at home and abroad.
Ben Bernstein '09 received a preemptive Pulitzer for this column last week.
