America Is Challenged Again By Its Own Presidency

Ronald Reagan’s presidency saddled America as a society with the challenge of looking at itself in the mirror and telling itself nothing but the truth about what it saw. However, American society woefully failed itself in that regard. Rather than disclose that the man Reagan lacked the intellectual capacity required for the highly demanding office he occupied, the society shielded his lack of that capacity all in the bid to protect the US presidency, an office which is so highly exalted by a good majority of Americans to the point that stokes their conviction that it is divinely-ordained to provide the leadership necessary for the so-called shining city on the hill to lead the rest of humanity out of decadence.

The eagerness to flaunt Mr. Reagan’s superb communication skills was almost suffocating. His affliction with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive ailment that cripple’s the mental capacity of its victims slowly but decisively over the course of time was probably kept from public view until it became impossible to hide successfully any more. Even then, the preference was to portray him as a cowboy riding away into the sunset but to nowhere in particular. Rather than come clean and admit that there was nothing but hollow to the man, Edmund Morris, who was commissioned to write Mr. Reagan’s authorized memoir and given unfettered access to him in the White House and even after he left the place at the end of his mandatory two terms, claimed instead that his subject was impenetrable. To the effect that what he produced as a memoir 14 years later in 1999 was a faction in which he blatantly tried to portray him as an exceptional gift from God to the rest of the world.

George W. Bush’s presidency has saddled America with a challenge almost similar to the one it unsuccessfully grappled with in Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. This time, some sections of the American society, including some mass media channels are effectively trying to sanctify themselves in their efforts to factually portray what The New Yorker starkly describes as “the callow, lazy, and ignorant President”. The four-part series in Washington Post last week entitled, “ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY” will remain one of the more explicit proof of this description of Mr. Bush. More than anything else, the series expose the systematic manner with which Mr. Cheney has taken advantage of Mr. Bush’s apparent hollowness to become “the most influential public official in the country” even though he occupies ‘what John Adams called’ “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. The Post series authored by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker are so revealing that there is hardly much doubt in the minds of many Americans about who is actually in charge of their affairs during the Bush presidency. The only initiative that Bush went out of his way to take without Cheney’s clearance was his unsuccessful appointment of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court. According to the Post series, that rebellion was quickly shot down by Cheney who after muttering derisively to an associate that Bush “Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself” engaged his “right-wing allies to upend Miers”. That was how Cheney finally compelled Bush to return to the short list of five appellate judges that he prepared and kept handy ahead of time, to select Samuel Alito

It took the invasion of Iraq by false pretences to awaken sections of the American society to the task of grappling the challenge that it is faced with in the Bush presidency.