Horsing Around With the Electorate

Even after our brief and successful military operation in Iraq, anti-war agitators have not stopped their venomous carping about President Bush.

The latest is that he’s a ruthless political opportunist. Objecting to Bush’s appearance on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman complains, “The Constitution declares the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That’s why American presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations.”

Comparing Bush to French military general Georges Boulanger, known for his public appearances on horseback and in full military uniform, Krugman explains: “Boulanger became immensely popular. If he hadn’t lost his nerve on the night of the attempted putsch, French democracy might have ended in 1889.” In case the logical connection between Bush donning a flight suit and Boulanger plotting a coup isn’t clear, Krugman slyly asks, “Has ‘man on horseback’ politics come to America?”

If the analogy seems far-fetched, that’s because it is. Official checks on executive power matter far more than a president’s public “affectations.” The only link between appearing in military uniform and tyrannically taking over the U.S. that Krugman establishes is that Bush might use the stunt to boost his popularity (“Boulanger became immensely popular”).

But after more than two centuries of representative democracy and effective rule by law, solidifying political norms that Bush couldn’t change if he wanted to, a Boulanger-style putsch would be extremely unpopular. If Bush’s theatrics really were an assault on American values, voters wouldn’t need a newspaper columnist to explain it to them.

Krugman and his fellow ideologues aren’t admitting that it’s the war, not just Bush, which is popular with Americans. Pre-war CNN polls showed that more than 60 percent of Americans supported military intervention in Iraq, on par with Bush’s approval ratings. The roughly equal percentages make sense. Bush can serve his political ambitions only by catering to the electorate; if the war did indeed serve Bush’s personal aspirations, it must also have been a war that most Americans believed was just. In our democracy, ambition can’t subordinate the will of the majority, a point that’s missing from Krugman’s analysis and something that distinguishes us from late 19th-century France.

But the “man on horseback” fantasy, for lack of better argument, is popular with the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd. In a Crimson op-ed, historian Howard Zinn characterized military intervention in Iraq: “Those who die in this war will not die for their country. They will die for their government. They will die for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. And yes, they will die for…the political ambitions of the President.”

In a representative democracy, the distinction between dying for one’s government and dying for one’s country does not exist. Zinn confuses the United States, a free country ruled by principles that the majority agrees are important, with a dictatorship centered on the individual leader’s ambitions—Saddam’s Iraq, for example. Unlike Saddam’s terror campaigns, U.S. military intervention isn’t personal. Bush’s foreign policy isn’t personal. Both serve American interests in security and peace; if Bush is reelected in 2004, it will be because his administration had the courage to protect those interests, which most Americans think are important.

Still, Krugman questions whether “man on horseback” politics has come to America. We should be heartened that we live in a society where it can’t.

—Luke Smith is an editorial editor.