Bush Hatred

Robert J. Samuelson's column in today's WaPo is on the ever-popular topic of "Bush hatred." The whole thing is worth a read, as I think it does a fairly good job of dealing with the topic. The conclusory paragraphs are on target:

In the end, Bush hating says more about the haters than the hated -- and here, too, the parallels with Clinton are strong. This hatred embodies much fear and insecurity. The anti-Clinton fanatics hated him not simply because he occasionally lied, committed adultery or exhibited an air of intellectual superiority. What really infuriated them was that he kept succeeding -- he won reelection, his approval ratings stayed high -- and that diminished their standing. If Clinton was approved, they must be disapproved.

Ditto for Bush. If he succeeded less, he'd be hated less. His fiercest detractors don't loathe him merely because they think he's mediocre, hypocritical and simplistic. What they truly resent is that his popularity suggests that the country might be more like him than it is like them. They fear he's exiling them politically. On one level, their embrace of hatred aims to make others share their outrage; but on another level, it's a self-indulgent declaration of moral superiority -- something that makes them feel better about themselves. Either way, it represents another dreary chapter in the continuing coarsening of public discourse.

The one thing he misses is that while it is certainly true that the actual number of "Bush haters" is realtively small versus the entire population, as was the case with Clinton, that there is a key difference with Bush: some of the "haters" of this president are in the mainstream media, and not just the punditocracy. While there were plenty of "Clinton haters" in the press during his tenure in office, they were either opinion-meisters only, or in less-than-mainstream (and small circulation) publication like the American Spectator that were hard to take seriously.