No one I know thinks of [George W. Bush] in salvific terms, and few think of him as good at governance . . . not a soul I know worships him at all . . .
They don't
now. But his supporters by and large
did, during the peak of his administration. You couldn't say
even one word in too many places against his assumptions of plenipotentiary presidential power, and his floutings of
the Constitution, without being jumped for blaspheming the Master or battered nigh unto death with one after another
laughable excuse for those floutings. (Bush Derangement Syndrome, anyone? By the way, President Lips II showed
his big government stripes long enough before his second administration.)
It had little enough to do with ideology unless you considered how many of those acolytes tried (laughably enough) to
assert he was thus upholding some sort of conservative agenda, and
everything just about to do with continuing
to uphold the presidency as the throne of the saviour rather than the mere chief executive.
That view of the presidency
transcends ideological considerations. There were plenty of conservatives, including
those not necessarily of the neoconservative persuasion, who saw the presidency that way during the Bush II years.
There are those conservatives who hold it as they settle or fall for Donaldus Minimus. Liberals held it during His
Excellency's administration, the Clinton administration prior, and surely held it supporting Hilarious Rodent Clinton,
a view not exactly discouraged by the candidate herself. There were even those among his supporters who held
the view during the Reagan years, and God only knows Lyndon Johnson's
and Richard Nixon's behaviours stirred
up arguments (and, in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s case, a book) about the Imperial Presidency.
(It's one thing to suggest that whom you think really was behaving like an imperial president depended upon who
gored your ideological ox---one recalls Patrick Buchanan, once a Nixon speechwriter, in
Conservative Votes, Liberal
Victories---claiming Watergate wasn't a product of the imperial presidency and those who said so said it merely for
political reasons---but it's something else again to reject the sad reality that the right is just as prone as the left to
embracing the imperial or the saviourship presidency.)
Since the advent first of Theodore Roosevelt and then Buttinski Wilson, imperial presidents of apparently opposing
philosophies otherwise, more and more Americans of assorted ideological stripes have come to view the presidency
and the president---not to mention the entire government---as a saviourship. Whatever one's ideology, it is and has
long been a dangerous view, and its sharing by assorted presidents and presidential candidates since has led us to
dangerous hours.
