Arrested Pulse

I've been tough on George W. Bush. Elsewhere I argued that his ineptness as CEO of America is responsible for bringing us into an economic depression--although few have called the "financial crisis" a depression--that may very well result in a drastic reduction of our standards of living and enormous hardships for the rest of our lives.

But on January 6, when I saw him flanked in the Oval Office by Barack Obama and ex-presidents George H.W. Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, I saw a man whose day of reckoning had come, gouged out its mark, and moved on.

Gone is the hard-fightin' coach shouting through a bullhorn at Ground Zero, the gloating fighter-pilot declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, the cowboy CEO whose shoulders seemed glued to an invisible cross as he swaggered back and forth before reporters with television cameras.

The George W. Bush I saw on January 6 was a resigned, somewhat sad man who had once gorged voraciously on glory without considering the parasites that inhabited its innards. I saw a man actually eager to live vicariously through his predecessor, especially when he turned to President-Elect Obama and said "One message that I have and I think we all share is that we want you to succeed."

This was perhaps the only thing I have ever heard George Bush utter which I felt came from the heart. It wasn't scripted, it wasn't "planned," it wasn't awkwardly off-the-cuff. It was spoken by a tragic figure well aware of his own hubris, who knows--like we all do, like the whole world does--that he himself did not succeed as president of the United States. Far, far from it.

When Bush speaks from the heart, and not when trying to remember talking points or attempting to say something "deep," he is actually quite eloquent: "Whether we're Democrat or Republican we care deeply about this country. All of us who have served in this office understand that the office itself transcends the individual." Is this the real George W. Bush?

When he shook Obama's hand and said, "We wish you all the very best, and so does the country," he exuded a kind of expression which, to me, revealed a man who does deeply care about people, and about the country, despite the fact that actions taken by his administration have irreversibly diminished the lives of so many people both here and abroad.

George W. Bush leaves office with the lowest approval ratings of any US President. Soberly, Americans now realize that everything he stood for that they supported--tax cuts for the rich, invading Iraq, deregulating financial markets--were terrible errors with woeful consequences for all.

In this clip, we see George W. Bush not being flip or preoccupied with speaking in lofty rhetoric about freedom and democracy. Perhaps had he just been himself from day one of his presidency, and not let others do the governing for him, we'd be living in a better country today and he'd be leaving with approval ratings worthy of a man whose nature is basically good. It's a shame he let others do all the thinking for him.