An Uncertain Popularity

"Look, ma! The clothes have no emperor!"

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson

For a guy who has the highest or second highest job approval ratings in history (78% to 90% depending on who is polling), Putsch sure acts defensive.

First, there is the matter of Clinton. Without really meaning to, Clinton showed up Putsch pretty badly in the aftermath of the New York disaster. Clinton came to Manhattan and hugged people and said the right things and was just generally Clinton at his very best. Putsch dragged in a few days later, already smarting from questions about just what he thought he was doing the day of the attacks, and shouted unusually empty homilies at the firefighters and cops who were working on the wreckage. No hugs for the kids, not from this silver-spoon boy. Clinton, carefully striving not to put Putsch in a bad light or second guess him in any way, has so embarrassed the White House with his clear leadership superiority that they have descended to asking the tv networks to start downplaying Clinton.

There were the events of 9/11, as they involved Putsch. Putsch was bundled aboard AF-1 and hustled off from Florida to Louisiana, and then to the president's nuclear hidey-hole out west. Dick Cheney was running the show from the White House, and said so on television a few days later, which caused Putsch and his flacks considerable embarrassment. A sizeable percentage of Americans already realize that Cheney, not Putsch, is running things in the White House, and Putsch was annoyed that Cheney was so blatant about it.

The White House, incidently, is so well fortified at the lower levels that it could survive just about anything except a direct hit from a nuke.

The White House decided that they needed to come up with a heroic-sounding story to explain this, and came up with an amazing fable about the presidential jet being a target for a fourth or fifth hijacked plane. Presumably the Boeing 757 would wait near National Airport, hovering like a helicopter, and as soon as AF-1 showed up, it would pounce! As a viable scenario, it had all the credibility of a Harrison Ford movie.

The White House also suggested that the fourth plane, the one crashed in Pennsylvania, was intended to hit the White House. While it was far too far from the eastern seaboard to guess which city actually was its intended target, it was pointing toward New York when it went down. Worse, the plane that plowed into the Pentagon flew right past the White House, less than three miles away, apparently without so much as a sideways glance. There's nothing to indicate that any of the terrorists had any interest in the White House.

Nicolas Von Hoffman wrote a scathing column for the New York Post, implying that Putsch was a coward and suggesting the presidential plane be renamed "the White Feather One".

While the vast majority of the American population was too preoccupied to notice, the rest of the world noted that this strange sort-of president was making bizarre pronouncements, including a call for a “crusade” against the Moslem lands, a buffoonish wild-west call for Osama bin Laden “dead or alive”, and a perplexing threat to bomb the ports of Afghanistan. It came to light that one reason our intelligence failed so drastically was because only a handful of operatives even spoke any of the languages common to the middle east. It also came to light that Israel, among others, had warned America of a major operation scheduled for September, which America ignored. And as Putsch spoke of "war" against Osama bin Laden, gradually more and more people in America wanted to know how you go about declaring war against an individual, with no declaration of war.

Between war fever and the fascistic instincts of the right, assaults on people and their rights mounted. Barbara Lee, the courageous lone dissenting voice in the Congressional vote to give Putsch $40 billion to spend however he wanted in his undeclared war against an unknown enemy, got death threats, and so-called "patriots" on the radio and in the GOP called for her resignation, censure, expulsion from the House, and arrest - for the "crime" of casting a lone dissenting vote!

Several Republicans selflessly suggested that this might be a good time for loyal Americans to forget about those little voting irregularities in Florida. That was a tactical mistake. All it did was remind them of it. The New York Times announced the main recount of Florida undervotes, scheduled to be released right about now, would be "indefinitely delayed". Quite a few of us thought that was just a little too convenient.

Republicans and the right wing pseudo-media questioned the loyalty of anyone who suggested we might want to find out who actually committed the crimes of 9/11 before we started bombing people. Dark-skinned people were assaulted - at least 400 such instances occurred and one, a Sikh, was killed.

Ashcroft came up with his laundry list of new laws designed to get government off our backs, 51 new laws that severely curtailed freedom of speech and gave the government nearly unlimited licence to monitor communications among its subjects. Some people marveled at the ability of Ashcroft to come up with such a fantastic panoply of laws designed to control people in such a short amount of time, but I suspect it's something he's fantasized about for years. He wants to teach those non-believers a lesson they'll never forget.

Rush and his fellow demagogues bellowed that if you didn't "support the president" completely, you were at best unpatriotic and at worst a traitor. This advice, coming from people who had gleefully spent the previous eight years calling the President a murderer, a rapist, a liar, a thief and disparaging his efforts to control terrorism, failed to impress many Americans. Indeed, it probably backfired, because, let's face it: when you hear a sleazy, dishonest, treacherous slimeball like Oliver North barking that disloyalty to the president is treason, the first thing you think is that Ollie, going by his own new standards, should have been dragged out and shot many years ago and many times since. How the hell can you take invocations of loyalty to the president seriously from people who spent most of the past eight years talking about Arkicides and blowjobs? Hundreds of accusations, and the only ones that turned out to have any merit were the blowjobs, and the fact that Clinton fibbed about them. Not one right winger has ever apologized for spreading the lies, which suggests that most of them knew they were lies at the time. And these patriotic, moral paragons want to lecture us on how to behave like good Americans?

Ari Fleischer has been forced to admit that the AF-1 story was just a fable, but blames it on a miscommunication, and issued another blanket threat "to be careful what you talk about" to the media. This time they noticed. In an exchange that was described by other reporters as "tense", Helen Thomas asked Dirty Ari if there were any times when he would feel justified in lying to the media. While the actual answer, and the one Dirty Ari gave instead, both seem apparent, it does put him on record as saying he would not lie to the media. Gawd help him next time he does it.

In the meantime, criticism from both the left and the right continued to grow over the "emergency measures" that Ashcroft wanted in order to control the American subjects. A couple of well-publicized efforts to get rid of television and radio people who dared question some of Putsch's actions further heightened the sense of public concern.

For all the talk about war and retribution and so on, the fact is that not a single shot has been fired by an American. While this suggests restraint and wisdom on the part of the administration, it actually hurts them politically, since people can't wave flags and scream for blood indefinitely without a little action to keep them stirred up. In a way, Putsch is actually being hurt by the very war fever that his administration tried so hard to stir up.

It didn't help any that on the same day a radio talk show host got fired for saying Putsch "skedaddled" on 9/11 (oh, for the days when they only accused presidents of rape and murder!), the White House was caught trying to get the media to downplay Clinton's activities. Nothing like reminding people of the Republican double standard, and what real leadership was like.

So with war fever being subdued by common sense, and grief and patriotism being supplanted by concern over what the actual objectives of the White House might be, Putsch finds himself in a precarious position.

How often will you see a President with approval ratings around 80% developing a bunker mentality? The White House acts strangely defensive, and with good reason: as the grief and frenzy diminishes, people are looking hard at Putsch, and asking all the wrong questions. What is he going to do about the terrorist attack? Who are we going to blame for it? If security is so important, why did he just gut the best suggestion made yet to prevent another 9/11 - the federalization of airport security? If he cares about the people so much, why did they give $20 billion in bailout money to the cheap and negligent airline carriers, but refuse to extend unemployment and education benefits to all the employees laid off by those companies? Why should we listen to Rush and Ollie and "Doctor" Laura when they say we must respect the president as a matter of patriotism? Just WHY do we need all those laws denying due process and ripping up the 4^th amendment?

Right now, Putsch has truly gaudy approval ratings, the highest in history. But I suspect the approval is strictly the "rally round the flag, boys" variety, and won't last. And, given the institutional weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the neo-fascist right that props up the Putsch regime, it will come down very hard.

Putsch's poll numbers remind me of nothing so much as how tall and sturdy the World Trade Center towers looked on September 10^th, 2001.