On a recent episode of The Daily Show, Ron Howard, who was on the program to promote his film Frost/Nixon, said something that rankled me. He opined that, were George W. Bush to grant an exhaustive post-presidency interview the way Richard Nixon did in 1977, Jon Stewart would be the ideal interviewer -- meaning that Stewart would ask Bush the tough questions the way David Frost grilled Nixon all those years ago.
Howard can't really be blamed; he was trying to sell his movie and endear himself to the youth contingent by kissing up to Stewart a little. But his comment propagated a myth that has been persistent and unwavering over the past eight years -- a myth that should have died many moons ago. The myth goes like this: President Bush is actually a pretty complex guy, despite his one-note facade. In private, he's capable of expressing remorse for his horrible mistakes, and maybe, if he were prodded in just the right way, he could do so in public.
There has not been one shred of evidence that any of this is true. George W. Bush may be politically savvy, and his relationship with his dad may be grist for for many a pop psychologist's mill. But when it comes to unpopular presidents with murky morals, George W. Bush ain't Richard Nixon. Never was, never will be. Historians will argue over who did more damage to the country, who had more of a penchant for hiring political cronies, and who played the elitism card more effectively. But in the contest of which president you'd rather see bare their soul on national television, Nixon wins going away.
Bush's stunning lack of self-awareness isn't just patently obvious, it's a hallmark of his presidency. But since he's (still) the president, every little off-the-record or off-the-cuff remark he makes is treated as if it's some kind of grand revelation. Thus, Bush saying that he was "unprepared for war" in a recent interview is big news, despite the fact that he clearly meant he hadn't expected to fight a war at the beginning of his term, not that he went into Iraq without a battle plan. And we have him "regretting" that the intelligence wasn't up to snuff on Iraq. (Basically the equivalent of saying "I'm sorry that you're angry" in a fight with your significant other.) Haven't people learned that he's not about to admit culpability for anything after eight years of not admitting culpability for anything?
President Bush won a gubernatorial election and two presidential elections in large part thanks to his ability to stay on message. He excelled, and continues to excel, at saying the same thing in a thousand different ways, at working his talking points into every answer, and at avoiding slip-ups (English language gaffes excepted.) He may the least interesting interviewee to ever occupy the White House.
Nixon, on the other hand, continues to fascinate for any number of reasons. It's not just that he used his prodigious intellect to achieve sinister ends. (That's a compelling enough story as it is.) It's also that, beneath his political-mastermind exterior, lurked a reflective person. Paranoid, unstable, and ugly, yes, but also reflective. He was fully aware of how his actions affected people. And that made him oddly relatable -- he was the political manifestation of the dark side in all of us.
When George W. Bush talks, there's not a trace of that sort of that Nixonian psychodrama -- or of the Nixonian playfulness. Much of Frost/Nixon (by the way, it was only a fair movie, but that's a whole 'nother can of spaghetti) involves Nixon in playful mode, whether that means mocking Frost's wearing of Italian loafers or going off on intellectual digressions to avoid answering a question directly. Can you imagine George Bush doing that? I'd rather watch twelve episodes of The Moment of Truth than a six-hour interview with the man.
Perhaps the whole state of affairs can be best summed up in a bit of dialogue from that political powerhouse Seinfeld. Chatting with Jerry at the diner, Elaine proposes that Newman perhaps isn't the simple monster Jerry thinks he is. "Maybe there's more to Newman than meets the eye," she says. "No," Jerry responds. "There's less."
