Dahlia Lithwick: Why not to cast Bush as a baby

[Nambe]

Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, wrote this article for the New York Times.

Maybe it's just that I'm having too many long talks with my 16-month-old these days, but I find myself sensitive to the language of "daddies" and "dummies." This is the language of toddlerhood; it's not how we should be framing a national conversation about the president.

It cannot have escaped anyone's notice that much of the current Bush-bashing aims to infantilize him. The most devastating segment in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," for instance, features the president in a Florida classroom -- just after he learned of the second attack on the World Trade Center -- looking glazed and confused as he listens to a reading of "The Pet Goat." Bush's aide might well have whispered the news to one of the assembled students to greater effect, and the implication is inescapable: For seven long minutes, the president was Not a Man.

A glance at the top 150 ads selected by MoveOn.org for its recent political advertising contest, "Bush in 30 Seconds," similarly reveals the extent to which childishness is woven into the current Bush-bashing. While children have long been used in political ads to represent the future, many of the MoveOn entries use them to satirize the actual candidate. Several of the proposed anti-Bush commercials use kids to condemn the president for unsophisticated thinking, for an infantile worldview, for the fact that his daddy purchased his every big break and for the fact that he is desperately beholden to the wealthy and powerful grown-ups surrounding him. The clear message is that Bush is more a child than an adult. ..

Furthermore, the campaign to cast Bush as a bumbling child ignores the very grown-up machine that stands behind him. Infantilizing the president shifts the focus away from the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts and Wolfowitzes. These are the men who promised us short, easy wars and painless little suspensions of the Geneva Conventions. These are the men of the secret energy-policy meetings. They aren't a bunch of rowdy juveniles. They represent one of the most secretive, powerful administrations in recent memory. Whether the president could outscore your kids on the SAT is a distraction from that fact. ..
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