Nicholas Lemann has in this week's The New Yorker one of the most probing, and I think genuinely insightful, considerations of President Bush that's yet been written. It's a charged study, sympathetic but unapologetic, and, finally, a sobering account of things past and present that should make even those not naturally trepidatious of the President's re-election bid pause. It is, in short, an article that should be read in full. Both nuanced and impressively synoptic, Lemann's article may do the impossible, accounting for those qualities that have endeared him to many, but also accounting for why those qualities (to say nothing of his lesser ones) may also make him one of the most dangerous candidates for the Presidency in recent memory, and certainly at this awkward and very fragile point in modern history. It's a terrific piece. Look for it to be making major headlines in the next week-- and look for it, perhaps, to provide the arguing points for the Democrats and Senator Kerry to attack the President not as a caricature, but as a kind of tragic hero to whom Americans risk tying their own future at their own immediate peril. And it does so, I hasten to add, without lapsing into the glibness or the anger that so often seems to get the better of those of us that regard the President as a genuinely worrisome, and even stupefying, figure.
I strongly encourage everyone to read Lemann's article, and to direct others to it. It may prove to be more valuable than a dozen Bob Woodward books. Hell, I'd even encourage the President to read it: I wonder if he might be overcome with that same sense of disturbed self-awareness that one normally has when hearing one's voice on tape for the first time.
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