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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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MAKING MISTAKES “Gettysburg,” said historian Shelby Foote, “was the price the South paid for having R. E. Lee.” By this he meant that General Lee’s many splendid victories at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia were finally offset by his huge tactical mistake at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Lacking cavalry reconnaissance, and thus misjudging the enemy’s strength and preparation, Lee ordered the frontal attack on the Union center known to history as “Picket’s Charge”. His senior commanders cautioned him against it, but Lee could not be stopped. “The enemy is there, and I mean to strike him,” he said. Massed Union artillery and musketry smashed Picket’s division and crippled Lee’s army – ending the South’s dream of winning the war by marching victoriously through several northern cities. I am not the first to observe that great leaders often make mistakes on a grand scale. History is filled with examples. Sometimes, later successes caused those mistakes to be forgotten. In other cases, the mistakes were so damaging that the affected leader (and his cause) could not recover from them. The latter was true for Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, although Lee’s reputation was already secure by the time Gettysburg happened. To Southerners, he is immortal. I mention these generalities about leaders and mistakes for two reasons: first, because it is rare for a leader to avoid making mistakes; and second, because our current president has made some, and will probably make a few more before his term is over. The modern rule of presidential politics – applied exclusively to conservative administrations by the liberal Media – is that a presidency must be completely error-free. One mistake and it is “finished”. A big enough mistake (goes the working story) means erosion of support from the president’s political base, leading to loss of enough Senate and House seats to put Democrats back in power. This will mean a complete political realignment, culminating in the election of Hillary Clinton in 2008; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera… Republicans, are therefore just a Bush-stumble away from doom. Trusting in delusions like this, instead of fashioning an alternate vision for the country, is what ails the Democratic Party. In truth, Mr. Bush has made several miscues in the last month or two. Causing Hurricane Katrina by failing to support the Koyoto Treaty was a very serious error. (What could his people have been thinking?) And, of course, blowing up the New Orleans levees to drown all those poor black people backfired, big-time. Luckily, Mayor Ray Nagin and his peerless NOPD foiled the Bush plot and saved thousands of stranded citizens from sure destruction. (I’d like to claim credit for inventing this crackbrained story, but certain black “leaders” actually came up with it.) All seriousness aside, not every miscue by Mr. Bush is a laughing matter. Nominating his former counsel, Harriet Miers, to Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat comes to mind. Perhaps the selection was made without the sound counsel of Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s most trusted and politically perspicacious advisor. Was Mr. Rove distracted by possible legal problems? Did Mr. Bush hope he could mollify both feminists and conservatives by nominating an accomplished woman lawyer who was also an evangelical church member? Or had he simply reached his tolerance-limit for sanctimonious bloviations from Ted Kennedy, knowing he would barf all over the press-conference lectern if he had to listen to any more of them? Or maybe he simply liked and trusted Miss Miers and believed she would be an intelligent, fair-minded Justice. Whatever the actual motivation for the Miers nomination was, Mr. Bush and his staff entirely miscalculated the response of his political base – what politicians like Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton call the “Republican hard right” and the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, respectively. Democrats’ name-calling notwithstanding, the conservative wing of the Republican Party consists of millions of normal-culture citizens who want self-government back. Many of them voted for Mr. Bush chiefly because he promised to appoint judges to the Supreme Court in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, should he have the opportunity. Conservatives crossed their fingers (and maybe their eyes) and bought the nomination of John Roberts because he was so impeccably qualified. But they drew the line at Harriet Miers. No doubt she was an accomplished Texas lawyer and excellent counsel to Mr. Bush, but anyone could see she possessed neither judicial experience nor credentials. Attempts to cast her as a sister-under-the-skin of Scalia and Thomas (had they only been women) simply would not fly. A chorus of conservative opposition started modestly, but soon reached a crescendo that could not be quieted. I suspect it was Miss Miers – a keen politician herself – who asked Mr. Bush to let her withdraw in order to spare him further political damage. Finally, the plug was pulled. Political undertakers have already dug deep in their efforts to bury the Bush presidency. Mr. Bush will be ineffective for the final three years of his term, they say. He should nominate a “main-stream”, consensus candidate. Others, including Mr. Schumer, wanted Mr. Bush to “unify” the country with a “centrist” in the tradition of Justice O’Connor. (The latter was a marginal “conservative” who drifted maddeningly leftward during her twenty-four years on the Court.) Shockingly, however (to liberals, at least), Mr. Bush did not follow this defeatist advice. Like Robert E. Lee after Gettysburg, he has regrouped and positioned himself to fight on. Lee marched his army back to his home ground and proceeded to bloody the nose of the Union Army for another two years – coming within a whisker of outlasting his much stronger adversary. Lacking the beard and the impeccable uniform, but showing himself every bit as tenacious as Lee, Mr. Bush came out swinging after the Miers debacle. Refusing to be pushed into a politically correct nomination, Mr. Bush has instead named Judge Samuel Alito, a staunch conservative of impeccable Ivy League credentials. On the very day Judge Alito’s nomination was announced, liberals were already shouting from the housetops that this eminently qualified judge – unanimously approved by the Senate for the U. S. District Court just two years ago – is “too radical for the American people”. Mr. Bush has thus energized his conservative base by giving them the battle they craved over the direction of the Supreme Court. Everything considered, it is certainly better not to make mistakes than to make them. But given that making them is a certainty, the great thing – far beyond merely avoiding defeat by them – is to use mistakes to enhance one’s position. The greatest leaders, like R. E. Lee, knew how to do this. Mr. Bush has no aspirations – so far as I know – to be compared with Lee. But he does seem to be learning how to use his mistakes. It’s not a great victory, but it’s a start.
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