by James Fallows

Has Bush Been Smart All Along?

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Maybe it's just because the event happened between 2am and 3am China time. But I listened with mounting amazement to President Bush's post-election press conference on Wednesday.

It was not simply the tone of relative reasonableness and contrition—or as close to it as we've ever heard in public from this man—that was so surprising. Contrition? What the transcript renders as "It was a thumping," and what was actually delivered as "It was a thumpin,'" was more frank-sounding than anything the President has ever said about, well, Iraq.

The amazing aspect was that this man sounded smart. Consider the whole passage of which "thumpin'" was a part. It followed a question that had the giveaway introduction of, "With all due respect..." and went on to recount Nancy Pelosi's recent descriptions of George Bush as "incompetent, a liar, the emperor with no clothes," etc. How was he going to work with her now?

THE PRESIDENT: Suzanne, I've been around politics a long time; I understand when campaigns end, and I know when governing begins. And I am going to work with people of both parties.

Look, people say unfortunate things at times. But if you hold grudges in this line of work, you're never going to get anything done. And my intention is to get some things done. And as I said, I'm going to start visiting with her on Friday, with the idea of coming together.

Look, this was a close election. If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumping. But nevertheless, the people expect us to work together. That's what they expect. And as I said in my opening comments, there comes responsibility with victory. And that's what Nancy Pelosi told me this morning. She said in the phone call she wants to work together. And so do I. And so that's how you deal with it.

There, as words on the screen, it might not look remarkable. And on the merits, you could find things to admire (Hey, let's get things done) or to criticize (Hey, in campaigns anything goes, just think of the Swift Boats) in its underlying assumptions. But it also reflected a person who understood clearly the realities of his situation. And as delivered it was coherent, quick, and precise. Both "cumulative" and "nevertheless" flowed right off his tongue (as opposed to being shown off as trophy words, which the President is proud to have come up with) and were the right words for those moments. Each sentence is correctly formed.

Over six years we've become unbearably familiar with the tongue-tied George Bush of "the Google," of "is our children learning," of the anguished and humiliating pauses as he tries to fish out an appropriate word. After I described the startling contrast between the relatively glib Bush who governed Texas and the aphasic-seeming character who was our President, a number of readers wrote in to suggest that his increasingly-halting expression was in fact a sign of clinical mental deterioration, even of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. (We published such a letter.)

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