By MAUREEN DOWD
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How
strange that George W. Bush had his
appointment in Samarra: his commanders taking a stand against the relentless
Iraqi insurgents, trying once more to turn the corner in a war with endless
corners.
Mr. Bush is reminiscent of the protagonist of "Appointment in Samarra," by
John O'Hara - Julian English, the son of a WASP-y, aristocratic, renowned,
ineffectual father. Julian's pals were "the spenders and drinkers and socially
secure, who could thumb their noses and not have to answer to anyone except
their own families."
Bristling with filial tension and nurturing the chip on his privileged
shoulder, the son refuses to follow in the proper father's footsteps and instead
engages in, as John Updike put it, "impulsive bellicosity," falling into a
self-destructive spiral that starts when he throws a drink into an ally's face
at the club.
O'Hara prefaced the novel, his most brilliant, with a quotation from Somerset
Maugham about the futility of using a reverse playbook to avoid your fate: The
servant of a Baghdad merchant runs into Death at the marketplace and gallops off
as fast as he can to Samarra, thinking Death will not find him. But, it turns
out, their appointment is not for Baghdad on that day, but for Samarra that
night.
W. has rocked the nation and the world as he gallops fast, frantically trying
to avoid his dad's electoral fate.
He no longer has to chafe at his father's imposing shadow. If he wants to go
to war with Saddam without even discussing it with his dad, he can. If he wants
to keep his dad from having a speaking slot at the Republican convention, he can.
Even though the president, waving off any attempts to put him "on the couch,"
refuses to acknowledge any Oedipal sensitivities,
John Kerry artfully
drilled into the sore spot in the first debate.
Senator Kerry evoked the voice of Bush 41 to get under 43's thin skin. The
more Mr. Kerry played the square, proper, moderate, internationalist war hero,
the more the president was reduced to childish scowling and fidgeting, acting
like a naughty little boy who refuses to sit in his seat and eat his spinach and
do all the hard things a parent wants you to do.
"You know, the president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad beyond
Basra," Mr. Kerry said, as W. blinked and burned. "And the reason he didn't is,
he said, he wrote in his book, because there was no viable exit strategy. And he
said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That's exactly
where we find ourselves today. There's a sense of American occupation."
Mr. Kerry told the now-and-then Guardsman about the "extraordinarily
difficult missions" of our troops in Iraq: "I know what it's like to go out on
one of those missions where you don't know what's around the corner. And I
believe our troops need other allies helping."
Playing the Daddy card was part of the Kerry makeover by the Clintonistas -
Bubba eye for the Brahmin guy.
In their '92 debate, Bill Clinton used the same psychological trick to rattle
Bush 41. Objecting to the Republican pinko innuendo about a trip he had taken as
a young man to Moscow, Mr. Clinton reminded the first President Bush that his
father, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, had stood up to Joe McCarthy: "Your
father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my
patriotism."
The Bushes get very agitated when confronted with the specters of fathers who
made them feel that they never measured up.
And even though Mr. Kerry is more of a stiff loner than Poppy Bush, they
share enough - that patrician, dutiful son, star of the class and the playing
fields, hero on the killing fields, stuffed résumé, Council on Foreign
Relations, multilateral mojo - that he can easily get W.'s goat.
It was a sign of how unnerved W. was that he had to rely on his own dark,
foreboding and pathologically unapologetic surrogate Daddy, Dick Cheney, to
clean up his debate mess and get the red team back in the game.
The vice president shielded the kid by treating
John Edwards as even more
of a kid.
Mr. Kerry may take on the voice of Daddy Bush again in Friday's domestic
debate, pointing out that W.'s father tried to fix the deficit, rather than
mushrooming it to $415 billion.
The Clintonistas have infused the Kerry campaign with a new motto: "It's the
couch, stupid!"
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