D.C. Dispatch February 1, 2005

Other presidents had ways of at least seeming to be humble. George W. Bush doesn't.

The Canary's Song

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So the president has a tone problem. He's always had a tone problem, but his second Inaugural Address really sealed it. Although polls say the speech went over pretty well domestically, it definitely bombed abroad.

Normally, Americans shrug off that kind of response, assuming they're just misunderstood. But in this case, that's a bit hard to do: The speech was all about the world. Kind of hard to sell a product to people who abhor your marketing campaign. The idea that the American president has a private line to "the author of liberty" just isn't flying.

Bush's own political and media friends—the smart ones—see this as clear as day. They've seen it all along, but now they realize they'd better speak up before things get really dire. Thus, when Peggy Noonan wrote that the speech was a bit "God-drenched" for her tastes, she was the canary in Bush's coal mine.

And the problem isn't just all the God-talk, though that's what's getting attention. Noonan also noted that this White House appears to be suffering from "mission inebriation," or "a sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts."

In other words, Bush's tone issues are a question of humility—he doesn't appear to have any. The old "Mission Accomplished" carrier strut isn't enough to turn this war, or Bush's second term, into success stories. Before the election, another conservative canary, Christopher Buckley, wrote in the Washington Monthly that a second W. term was "not a terribly encouraging prospect" and would probably be a "bumpy" ride. Explaining why, Buckley homed right in on the humility gap: "Bush is a conspicuous Christian, but he is not on the whole given to conspicuous displays of one of the chief Christian virtues: humility. It would become him, should the Almighty bestow on him the grace of another term in office, to manifest some."

Let's face it: No modern president can be truly humble. This is the one job in which delusions of grandeur are impossible. The grandeur is very real. And it goes to your head. The White House ego trip has gotten even wilder since the Cold War ended and left the American president alone on his personal Olympus. Return them to office for a second term, as we've now done with two post-Cold War presidents, and they start hearing voices up there: "You're the tops, Mr. President. You're the Coliseum."

Other presidents had ways of at least seeming to be humble. Clinton had his lip-biting and his aw-shucks inflections. Bush's father had those WASP manners, in which modesty is an instrument for maintaining ascendancy. Reagan tilted his head just so, and when he talked about building "a shining city on a hill," his tone suggested that he viewed that city more or less the way John Winthrop did, as a model to be offered up for consideration ("the eyes of all people are upon us"), and in a spirit of generosity, not something imposed from above.

Bush's doesn't appear to care about any of this. He's CEO of the world, and he walks and talks as if he's about to fire everybody. His indifference to tone is mesmerizing, like a work of conceptual art designed to provoke and madden his audience. He's the Marcel Duchamp of American politics.

When Bush declines to modulate, there's a chance he's thinking of our enemies, consciously showing them his—and, by implication, our—mettle. If so, it's strange that his aides and supporters wind up doing so much back-pedaling. No sooner was the speech over than anonymous White House staffers were assuring journalists that the president hadn't really intended it to sound that way.

As The Washington Post put it after listening to some of these whisperers, the speech was actually just a "crystallization and clarification" of policies Bush is already pursuing around the world. The president's father even pulled some post-inaugural cleanup duty, telling reporters that the world "certainly ought to not read into it any arrogance on the part of the United States." In other words, we should ignore our own ears and eyes, and pretend that the words a man chooses mean less than they seem literally to mean.

But they don't mean less—and arguably, they mean more. The president's tone is the tone of his times. It speaks volumes, not just about him and his administration, but also about the culture he represents. It was striking that when Johnny Carson died earlier this week, so many of the media tributes and appreciations praised the man's self-deprecatory style, or what David Edelstein of Slate called Carson's "essential humility."

Why did we seize on that quality? Because it's become so rare. There really are no more Johnny Carsons. This is the age of Trump, of endless self-promotion and my-blog's-bigger-than-your-blog. Humility isn't even in the toolbox of power and fame any more. It's pointless and counterproductive. It yields no dividends and slays no foes. It just gets you fired and turns you into a loser.

The only good thing about Bush's tone problem is that it makes him relatively transparent. No matter how hard his people work to paper it over with nuance and retraction, what you see is what you get. This is the real Bush: no regrets, no doubts.

What's also pretty clear is where this is all headed. The reckoning may not come tomorrow or next month, but it will come. He who is not humble ends up having much to be humble about.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.