The Decline

The other story of Fallow's article is the incredible decline of Bush's rhetorical abilities since the early 1990s. Fallows, who has seen footage of Bush debating Ann Richards in 1994, claims that Bush spoke smoothly and fluently, using large words and avoiding the grammatical landslides for which he is so often pilloried. I haven't seen those tapes, but I take Fallows at his word; interestingly, Fahrenheit 9/11 contains a scene that corroborates what Fallows is saying. In an interview conducted either in 1990 or 1991, Bush is filmed explaining the advantages of having a dad running the free world, in terms of opening up business opportunities. "Access is power," Bush says at one point, with obvious personal experience. Although the scene is short, Bush came off as both shrewd and intelligent, possessing a kind of Cesare-Borgian cunning. (Mind you, Fallows does not suggest that Bush was ever a dazzling speaker---merely that he had the level of competency in public speaking that one would expect of a graduate of Andover and Yale.)

Look at Bush now, and it's as if a slightly autistic cousin with the same ideology had taken over speaking duties. He speaks in jagged sentence fragments rather than sentences; the timing of his pauses, facial manipulations, and laughter seem totally artificial; he struggles mightily to complete his thoughts and he is losing a thumb-wrestling match with verb complexes. What accounts for the disparity between Bush in 1994 and Bush in 2004?

Fallows offers a number of explanations. Perhaps, as a psychologist whom Fallows consulted suggests, Bush has some sort of learning disability, possibly dyslexia. But the symptoms of dyslexia don't suddenly set in during middle age, and the learning disability hypothesis cannot account for Bush's oratorical fluency in his mid-forties. More likely, Fallows thinks, is that Bush is either deliberately dumbing down his speech (if that were true then he might by now have reached a point where he has lost the ability to speak competently) for electoral purposes, or the enormity of his role as president, compared to the relative smallness of every previous position he has held (including governor of Texas), have left him unable to overcome the deer-in-the-headlights awkwardness he displays whenever in front of cameras; or perhaps it is some combination of those factors.

I would suggest, on a related note, that perhaps Bush, in trying to live up to his father's expectations, has subconciously inherited the tendency towards verbal sputtering that H.W. made notorious. Or that it is not an awareness of the magnitude of his responsibilities that makes Bush so woefully inadequate as a speaker, but a kind of mentally induced brain damage accrued by the stress of conducting a war presidency under constant public scrutiny---a hypothesis which, if true, suggests Bush was never physically qualified for the presidency in the first place. One last possibility (that I can think of) is that Bush is manifesting symptoms of an early-onset neurological disorder.

Anyway, thoughts, comments, and hatemail are warmly appreciated.