Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  Looking back, it is apparent that the Court has not always been right but we trust it because its members have been people with great experience, knowledge and wisdom. They have thought about the issues from every angle and made their decisions independent of any outside interests. The members don’t have to run for office and they don’t get fired. Let’s hope that if the President appoints any new members, the U.S. Supreme Court will maintain its even hand and let past decisions stand.

  NO UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTIONS

  We complain about our political parties, but it’s one of the true things about a democracy that the two-party system works best. As soon as there are three parties or just one, the whole system can break down. It’s why so many people were angry with Ralph Nader for starting his Green Party and distorting the delicate Democratic/Republican balance.

  The two parties are revving up now for another election and even when the politicians know who their candidate will be, they have to go through the ritual of choosing him at a convention. Every city wants a political convention because it fills the hotels and the Chamber of Commerce thinks it’s going to be good for local businesses. (It’s never as good for business as they think it will be.)

  Chicago has had the most political conventions, twenty-five. Philadelphia is next with nine. There have been five in New York, four in San Francisco and Baltimore, and three in Kansas City, Cincinnati and Miami Beach.

  A political convention takes over and dominates most cities, but when a convention is in New York, residents of the city hardly know it’s there. The city is so big with so much going on that the convention gets lost.

  The parties need approximately 20,000 hotel rooms, so smaller cities don’t get the conventions. Philadelphia has just about 20,000 rooms. Chicago has 28,000. New York has 66,000. If you want great food and would like to see a naked lady wrestle an alligator, you go to New Orleans.

  When you attend a political convention as a journalist, you are certain to question whether this kind of chaos, some of it not ethical and some even dishonest, is really the best way for a nation to set out to govern itself. The politicians often seem dumber than average citizens as they make long, meaningless speeches just to be on stage in front of a crowd. No one listens to what they say, and it doesn’t matter because they don’t say anything. The fact is that this process has worked for this country for too long to suggest we replace it. It may not be good, but we have never found anything better.

  There are only three ways anyone gets to rule a nation. The person can inherit the job from a father in power, the king usually, or he—almost always “he”—can seize power by force and maintain it with police who suppress opposition. Ours is the third way, and bad as it may be, it’s best and it makes political parties necessary.

  Considering how important political conventions are, I am embarrassed at how trivial my memories are of the dozens I’ve been to. Each one stands out in my mind, not for what happened or who was nominated but for some isolated incident. My first convention was in Chicago in 1956. I was writing the CBS Morning Show with Will Rogers Jr. The candidates were Adlai Stevenson and running mate Estes Kefauver. The most memorable thing that happened was the morning Bill Rogers, an old cowpoke, rode a horse up the marble steps and into the lobby of the Palmer House Hilton Hotel, the world’s largest hotel at the time.

  Another memorable scene was the day a police chief stopped Mike Wallace as he tried to enter the hall. Mike laughed and chucked the chief under the chin with his index finger. Mike thought it was funnier than the chief did, and he was instantly arrested, lifted off his feet with a cop at either elbow and carried off.

  Political conventions have lost their attraction because the decision about who the candidate will be has usually been made before the delegates vote. It makes a poor television show, and the networks have even considered not covering them in detail. I hope they continue to cover the conventions, dull as they may be, because if they do, I’ll be there, hoping to see someone ride a horse up marble steps into a hotel lobby, or Mike Wallace carried off by the elbows.

  BEATING AROUND BUSH

  When President Bush gave his State of the Union speech (known formally as an “Address”), I sat in my comfortable chair in our living room with my feet up, making random notes.

  President Bush was lucky his parents put the initial “W” in his name so that no one calls him “Junior.” Eleven presidents have had their father’s name and it doesn’t seem right. A president should have a name of his own.

  President Bush has done a good job of being his own man. None of us thinks of him any longer as being primarily George Bush’s son.

  Someone must have talked to the President about his persistent mispronunciation of the word “nuclear” because in recent speeches he has often said it properly. He has frequent relapses, though. In one speech in 2006 he pronounced it “nucular” twelve times. It just doesn’t make a president sound real smart.

  I got two phone calls during one speech of his from friends who said they couldn’t stand to watch him or listen to him. It always surprises me that people feel so negative about him. They don’t call him “President Bush.” They call him “Bush.” They spit out his name like an epithet. There were people who loathed Bill Clinton. I’ll bet someone in the audience at Gettysburg hated Lincoln’s speech there because they didn’t like Abe.

  They should always announce the name of the person or persons who wrote a president’s speech but they never do. Apparently, at least two men, both evangelical Christians, were involved in the writing of this one but they were not mentioned. The writer for any president has to be willing to write anonymously. A man named David Frum wrote the famous “Axis of Evil” line in President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech. Frum wasn’t around anymore after his wife bragged about his having done it in a magazine article.

  There were some quotable lines in Bush’s speech. Speaking to the troops who will fight if we attack Iraq, he said, “You believe in America and America believes in you.”

  Speaking about our allies who agree or disagree with him, President Bush said, “The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.”

  His best line was addressed to the people of Iraq: “Your enemy is not surrounding your country; your enemy is ruling your country.” Pretty good, whoever wrote it.

  After the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, President Bush made a big thing about capturing Osama bin Laden. He hasn’t mentioned him recently.

  It’s surprising that the President’s persistent support of the wealthiest Americans and of Big Business has not hurt his popularity with ordinary Americans who are not rich. He took their side in a big way in the speech both by advocating an end to taxes on stock dividends and by attacking trial lawyers who sue big companies.

  The Democratic or Republican response to any president’s speech has traditionally been terrible and people don’t listen to it. Both parties ought to give up that anti-climactic “response.”

  WE NEED SMARTER LEADERS

  Thinking about government abstractly, Americans are pretty much all in favor of democracy. We speak in grand terms about its virtues. When we talk about it more specifically, though, we aren’t so enthusiastic about the democratically elected politicians who run the country for us.

  Our leaders should be the smartest Americans, but pursuing politics as a career doesn’t usually interest the smartest people. They don’t want to have anything to do with government for several reasons. Sometimes it’s because they can make more money doing something else, or perhaps they don’t want to face the endless unpleasant problems that anyone in public office must. What happens is, we allow ourselves to be led by inferior leaders because no one better wants the job.

  A politician’s ego is fed by something that doesn’t nourish the rest of us. The men and women who do go into politics are attracted by the lure of power. Power is an aphrodisiac to which politicians are addicted. It’s not something that appeals to a great many m
en and women who might make better leaders. Those people are everywhere:The faculty of any one of our best colleges is, collectively, smarter than Congress.

  The doctors at any good hospital are smarter than the politicians in town.

  The lawyers who don’t go into politics are smarter than the ones who do, and judges at every level are smarter than politicians.

  Successful business people are usually brighter than politicians.

  Journalists are smarter than the politicians they report on.

  To be fair to politicians, you have to admit that they don’t do it for the money. There are dishonest grafters among them, but the majority of politicians are honest and their pay is low.

  In view of the intellectual mediocrity of too many politicians, it has occurred to me that we’re missing something important in our structure of government. We have the legislative, the judicial and the executive branches, and maybe we need one more. I don’t know what it should be called but it should comprise a group of fifteen or twenty people with the best brains in the land. Intellect would be the only requisite. It would be like the Supreme Court, but instead of deciding legal issues, this smart group would give its best advice on every important matter that affects the nation.

  These days, this Intellectual Council would hand down a decision on whether it was a good idea to attack Iraq without the UN sanction. The council would tell the President, in addition to what to do about Iraq, whether giving the rich a tax cut was a good idea.

  We’d pay these super smart people exactly what they were making before they got the job. If they were professors, we’d pay them the salaries their colleges paid them. If they were business executives making a million dollars a year, that’s what the government would pay them for this job.

  We’d look for people too smart to be always allied with one political party. They’d side with Democrats on some issues and with Republicans on others. They would pledge when they took office to be honest without considering who their decisions would be good or bad for—except the whole country.

  Here are some possible candidates for the job: Condoleezza Rice, Walter Cronkite, Tom Friedman, Colin Powell, Arthur Schlesinger, three Bradleys—Bill, Ben and Ed—and me.

  CLINTON AND BUSH

  Comparisons between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush persist. I don’t ever recall the specter of the last president looming so large over the incumbent as Clinton looms over Bush.

  If you are going to argue their merits as leaders, you have to exclude their personal shortcomings. George W. had a drinking problem and now his opponents are accusing him of being a liar. Bill Clinton’s appetite was not for alcohol but he lied and he may have ruined his reputation for the history books with the shortcomings in his character.

  One reason we keep drawing comparisons is they are both the same age, born in 1946. All good Democrats are waiting for a new candidate to emerge about whom they can become enthusiastic. They don’t see one yet.

  For the first time, President Bush is beginning to look vulnerable. His approval ratings are way down and his critics are louder. It seems likely those ratings will continue to drop if efforts to achieve peace in Iraq don’t improve.

  Bill Clinton is easier to be enthusiastic about and easier to detest than George W. Bush. Or so it seems to me, anyway. George W. doesn’t seem like a Phi Beta Kappa but neither do many of us.

  Democrats have always accused the President of lying to us about the reasons for the war in Iraq, about a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, about “leaving no child behind” and about who will benefit from tax cuts. The President’s justification for going to war with Iraq was always the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States with his weapons of mass destruction. There’s been so much talk about those weapons that newspapers are even referring to them as “WMD.” I’m not an apologist for the President but his critics see evil that I don’t see. I believe he honestly thought Saddam had nuclear or biological weapons that were a threat to us. I believe he believes the tax cuts will help everyone, I believe he believes his plan for schools will help every child. The fact that he may be wrong about all these things doesn’t make him a bad person. A little dumb, maybe.

  It’s probable that we ask too much of politicians. We expect them to be nice, intelligent, honest and of good moral character. That’s a lot to ask. We don’t demand that of any of our other heroes or public figures. When we look for a doctor, we don’t check into his preferences in matters of politics, religion, sex, exercise or food. All we ask is that he be a good doctor. If a politician is experienced in government and expert at leading us, maybe we shouldn’t expect him to be of sterling character, too.

  YOU DO, I THINK

  President Bush got his first seriously bad marks of his presidency in 2002 over the false information he used in his State of the Union speech charging that Iraq was trying to buy fissionable material from Niger for making nuclear weapons. (Niger is not to be confused with Nigeria—with which I confused it.)

  I often annoy friends and family members by defending President Bush when they accuse him of perfidy. In the quiet of my own mind on those occasions, I try to think why it is I’m taking sides with a president I didn’t vote for and with whose policies I seldom agree.

  It may simply be my perverse nature or it may be because I have some sympathy for politicians in general. They’re doing a hard job I couldn’t do. I keep thinking what terrible work being president is. (In a brief conversation I once had with Bill Clinton, he laughed and said he couldn’t tie his shoelaces in the morning without someone complaining that he was doing it wrong.)

  The thing you have to give George W. Bush, like him or not, is that he’s doing it. There are many important decisions that have to be made and he doesn’t sit around worrying something to death before acting on it. The fact that his decisions may have a good or bad effect on millions of people here in the United States and others elsewhere does not seem to keep him awake at night. Hee couldn’t be president if it did.

  President Bush is driven by concepts of the economy, world affairs and religion with which I do not agree but it’s a good thing he’s president and I’m not. I’d be sitting there thinking all day without coming to any conclusions. I’d anguish over how wrong any decision I made would be. I read an article by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times condemning Bush for the “pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess.” It was a good column—certainly better than Bush could have written—but we’re probably better off with Bush as president than Kristof.

  The relaxing thing about being a writer is, what you say doesn’t really make a damn bit of difference. People may agree with me or disagree, love me or hate me, but what I say has no effect whatsoever on anyone. What I write about the economy doesn’t effect the economy. What I write about war, the French, the Yankees, summer vacations or George W. Bush doesn’t have the slightest bit of influence on the economy, the French, the Yankees, summer vacations or George W. Bush.

  George W. Bush, on the other hand, can’t raise a finger without it influencing someone’s life—and perhaps the lives of millions of people. That’s why thinking is so much easier than doing. George W. Bush is doing more doing than thinking and a lot of us can criticize him for it but we criticize with words which are insignificant compared to his actions.

  In a general sense, this is why politicians are taken more seriously than college professors. College professors may be smarter and more profound thinkers but it doesn’t matter. What politicians who don’t think much actually do makes a big difference to all the rest of us—including college professors.

  George W. Bush does not seem to be a profound thinker. The history of his academic life does not suggest he ever was. His political enemies, though, would have to concede that, right or wrong, he does things. He makes up his mind and once made, no well-thought-out argument from an opponent can change his mind.

  The deepest thinkers have never been the best leaders
. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t wish we had a better thinker in the White House.

  THE POWER OF A PRESIDENT

  It’s difficult to know how important the administration of any one American president is. A president with strong opinions about government, money, justice and the uses of power has a great deal of influence on the country for at least the four years he’s in office. Other presidents just seem to come and go, presiding over the status quo without making any changes that rock the boat.

  Every once in a while, we have a president who makes a permanent difference in what the United States is like and what it will be like in the future.

  Abraham Lincoln changed the course we were on with the Civil War. Whether it was his fault or not, Herbert Hoover will never be forgotten because of the lasting effects of the Great Depression that occurred during his presidency.

  In modern times, Franklin D. Roosevelt made permanent changes for the better in the lives of all Americans by pushing the Social Security Act with old age benefits and unemployment insurance into law in 1935.

  The backbone of our democracy is the Constitution and you would think it would have a stabilizing effect. However, the Constitution is subject to both alteration and interpretation so there is some room for major change to be made by a president even under it.

  President Bush does not seem to have profound theories of government but he has strong opinions that are taking this country in a different direction. It is going to be difficult for any liberal who may be elected in the future to change what has been done or alter the course it has set us on.