It's much more cultural than political.

May 25, 2002

Until you laugh at plastic fish, Bush will be a mystery

ben macintyre
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Bush is the most American American President since Ronald Reagan. George Bush the elder was a classic East Coast cosmopolitan, with the patrician’s easy ability to blend and schmooze. Bill Clinton was the foreign tourist par excellence, with a chameleon knack for taking on the colour of his surroundings. But Bush is as irreducibly Texan as Reagan was Californian, and for that reason, again like Reagan, most Europeans don’t quite “get” Bush, and probably never will.

The Bush mystique is almost untranslatable abroad. To appreciate it you need to have shot the breeze in a baseball dugout; you must find the sound of a train’s whistle keening across a night prairie the most beautiful music on earth; you must believe that Norman Rockwell was a great artist, wear cowboy boots without irony and know the quiet pleasure of eating Cheez Doodles in front of the Super Bowl. It is not so much the vision thing, as a pretzel thing.
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During the election campaign Bush was delighted to be presented with a “Billy Bass”, one of those plastic fish on a wall mounting that break into song and remain amusing for about two days. He showed it all around the campaign plane. Only later did it transpire that Bush had been sent hundreds of these things from voters around the country: telling proof of quite how clearly America knew, and shared, his sense of humour. Jacques Chirac would open a vein rather than been seen with a singing plastic fish.

Bush is at his best working a crowd, high-fiving and joshing, or in a huddle with a handful of people; he is at his worst on a large podium, propounding large ideas in small sentences. “Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man who gasses his own people,” said the President in Berlin. This is the kind of blunt reduction that reassures Americans in the Midwest as much as it enrages Parisians on the Left Bank.

Compounding the culture gulf, Bush is a happy man. I don’t mean that he is smug, or one-dimensionally cheery. He is occasionally capable of expressing profound emotion. But he is comfortable in his skin, his religion, his family and his office. This has done wonders for American self-confidence at a time of the most profound trauma. If the first half of his presidency had been more placid, Bush’s natural optimism might swiftly have lost its appeal, but for many Americans something in Bush’s sunny and straightforward personality has provided an antidote for September 11.

Quite apart from his policies on the environment, Iraq and terrorism, Bush offends French sensibilities in a country where the President is expected to be aloof, cerebral, grave, private, formal and intensely serious. Thus, while France sees a caricature of crass America, much of America sees continuity, familiarity and reassurance.

Clinton was spiritually part European, but Bush’s popularity at home, and his unpopularity in much of Europe, lies partly in his refusal (or inability) to temper his Americanness.

Bush himself once told me an anecdote about an occasion when, on holiday in Scotland as a teenager, he had been mistaken for a Scottish shepherd boy by a coachload of American tourists. This was a notion he found utterly hilarious.