Question: Is the poll troubling?
The president: Polls? You know, if a president tries to govern based upon polls, you're kind of like a dog chasing your tail. I don't think you can make good, sound decisions based upon polls. And I don't think the American people want a president who relies upon polls and focus groups to make decisions for the American people.
-- President Bush's
Thursday news conference
*
The comic high point of President Bush's prime-time news conference Thursday evening was this muddled disquisition on how the American people don't want the president to do what (polls say) the American people want the president to do.
This could be simple nonsense -- an unfortunate conflation of two rhetorical devices treasured by politicians of both parties, but best kept a few paragraphs apart. One is the insistence that they don't follow the polls. The other is substituting the phrase "the American people" for the word "I" in sentences like, "The American people demand immediate passage of HR 5712, the Grotesque Subsidies to Widget Producers Act." Or the president could be struggling toward some kind of Burkean notion that he has been elected to lead people, not to follow their whims, and leadership matters only when it takes people where they don't want to go. Bush hinted at this after his reelection, saying that he had earned "political capital" that he intended to spend. And I'm giving him credit for this high-minded explanation, based on the rest of his performance Thursday.
There was a remarkable amount of honesty and near honesty. Bush's rebuff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was superb. The people who oppose his judgeship nominees aren't prejudiced against religion, he said. They do it because they have a different "judicial philosophy." That is exactly the point. His characterization of the difference -- his opponents "would like to see judges legislate from the bench" -- is not quite right. Just a couple of weeks ago, his party tried desperately to force judges to "legislate from the bench" to prevent the removal of life support from Terri Schiavo. But a straightforward debate about judicial philosophy is indeed what we need.
Then it got even better. Starting with the cliche that in America you can "worship any way you want," Bush plunged gratuitously into a declaration that "if you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship." How long has it been, in this preacher-spooked nation, since a politician, let alone the president, has spoken out in defense of nonbelievers?
