The Roosevelt Legacy Bush Shouldn't Carry On

How

to explain the Bush administration? Or more precisely, how to explain the defining characteristic of George W. Bush's presidency — this fondness for rhetorical extravagance, this straining after greatness, this implausible invocation of only the loftiest goals and purposes?

I used to think it was a boomer thing. After all, the only other baby boomer president, Bill Clinton, had it too. In the 1990s, when no one really wanted much from the federal government except favorable tax treatment for our 401(k)s, Clinton would stand before Congress and the TV cameras, he would work his jaw and narrow his eyes, and he would tell the nation with a vigorous thrust of the thumb that the nation faces a "challenge as great as any in our peacetime history". Then, rising to the challenge, he would announce a new initiative to expand family leave.

Gilding the lily — casting the everyday and unexceptional in the most grandiose terms — has always been a weakness of boomers, who in their youth would sometimes compare Captain Marvel comic books to the Sistine Chapel or call Yoko Ono an artist. Overstatement has been George W. Bush's prime rhetorical technique. When he drew our attention to a handful of troublesome regimes, he couldn't just call them troublesome regimes; instead they ballooned into an "axis of evil." His hope of stabilizing the Middle East by fostering self-government was not just a geostrategic Hail Mary — it would lead, he said in the stunning capper to his second Inaugural, to "the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." Born into happiness and prosperity and languor, American boomers have long compensated by goosing their language, and their self-image along with it.

But I no longer think Bush's technique is just a boomer thing. I think it's a Roosevelt thing — and I don't mean the Democrats' Roosevelt, the one who used a cigarette holder and wore a cape, I mean the Republicans' Roosevelt, the one who wore buckskin and shot bears.

TR looms over every modern president, not just Republicans, as a goad or a reprimand, a taunt or an inspiration. Historian, hunter, soldier, essayist, cowboy, megalomaniac — he was bigger than life, in the way that all politicians hope to be. Richard Nixon, a president whose insecurities and intimations of unworthiness reached pathological levels, invoked TR throughout his presidency, right up to the mawkish speech he gave as he left the White House two steps ahead of the sheriff. For politicians of the soft and pampered boomer generation — "well-meaning little men," as TR once called the type, "with receding chins and small feet" — TR is a perfect reproof, and they respond by embracing him. Clinton placed a bust of the Rough Rider on his desk. Bush moved TR's portrait to a prominent spot in the Cabinet room, and to many an Oval Office visitor he proudly points to his desk as the same one Roosevelt used. "I call him Ted," the President has said.

Yet TR's influence on Bush reaches beyond rhetoric and interior decorating. Early on Bush declared himself a different kind of conservative, different from the government-libeling libertarians who seized Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994. Like TR, he would be a "big government conservative," a believer in "limited but vigorous" federal power. Indeed, Bush conservativism has proved to be so unorthodox as to be not really conservative at all.

Where Bush's agenda most resembles TR's is in its limitless ambition — its incessant busy-ness, its desperate need to appear to be addressing everything all at once. Even as he seeks the "end of tyranny in our world," Bush would also remake the government's entitlement system, rewrite the nation's tax code, reform its legal system, revolutionize worker training and health care; he would amend the constitution to define marriage and insert Washington into the nation's local schools as never before. In May, the administration celebrated one of its most trivial, and typical, programs — the Department of Transportation's "Click It or Ticket," which mobilizes the federal government to make sure that every driver in the country...is wearing his seatbelt.

"We stand at Armageddon," TR once told his followers, "and we battle for the Lord." Bush has never gone quite that far, but the world-saving impulse that is TR's most unappealing legacy inspires him even so. "Small-government" conservatives — which is to say, conservatives — wish he'd find another 20th century Republican hero. He might want to investigate Calvin Coolidge, whose own conservatism was more modest, more peaceable, and — by the way — more popular. If the president insists, he can even call him Cal.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard