Daily Reformer: What I remember about those days

Good morning, Reformers. 

Today we commemorate the attack on America on 9/11/2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians. About 100 million Americans and an equivalent number of Minnesotans were born after 9/11, and many more were too young to remember or grasp it, including many of the Reformer staff, so I’ve written what I remember about it at the bottom.

Inflation came in hot this morning, as Bloomberg reports (gift link). The smart money says the Fed is going to raise interest rates to fight inflation. The Iran War has broadened to include another key oil route, and diesel is above $6 a gallon. The Republican gerrymander across Dixie may help them hold the House, and the Senate map has always made Democratic control unlikely. But elections are determined by fundamentals. I suspect Republican operatives would love to trade places with Democrats these days.

To the Reformer:

The night of 9/11, I was drunkenly talking to a friend — this was my mode of dealing with all emotions then — and he said, “Our lives are about to get worse.” It was true while also capturing how shallow we were. We struggled to see what was beyond our immediate proximity. 

It was a time of great heroism and grief, with new stories emerging every day about those who’d run into the burning buildings, about lost lovers and fathers and friends, and much airy speculation about whether we’d entered a new American age of humble service and unity. 

But for me, these patriotic feelings were darkened by what I’d already come to suspect about George W. Bush. A friend and I had started a website and covered the early 2000 primaries. We’d seen up close the ugly South Carolina Republican primary against then-Sen. John McCain, including a whisper campaign that McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was actually his Black daughter from another woman. 

We chased Bush’s Texas Rangers’ motorcade one memorable afternoon as they ran through a bunch of red lights. He’d yet to win a single primary but was acting like the ruler of a fiefdom. The recklessness and arrogance seemed portentous. I’d read about Bush’s fail-son business career, and Karl Rove’s despicable history of character assassination. I’d watched the 2000 recount, when the conservative political machine outwitted the slow-footed Democrats at every turn, from Florida to the Supreme Court. 

Media in those days was a couple national magazines, the three network news anchors, Fox News and CNN, and The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. There was no blogosphere, no social media, no Substack. You had to be a reader of small circulation magazines or read Paul Krugman in the print copy of the Times to get the subtext, and then people looked at you crazy when you mentioned your suspicions, while Bush was at 90% approval rate.  

I don’t begrudge Americans for the tears they shed at Bush’s best moments — like when he held the bullhorn in lower Manhattan and threw out the first pitch at the World Series and made his address to a joint session of Congress. That same friend and I had even gone to lower Manhattan to (incompetently) volunteer at the cleanup site. 

But as far as I was concerned at the time, everything was the cynical use political theater to drive Bush’s sinister agenda.

I was a callow young man, but I was right, as the next few years would bear out. 

They cut taxes on the wealthy, rolled back environmental regs, deregulated Wall Street and gave federal law enforcement intrusive new powers via the Patriot Act. Worst of all, they sold America on a foolish, hubristic and horrifying war in Iraq that was entirely unrelated to 9/11. 

The Democrats — with some exceptions, including Sen. Paul Wellstone — meekly stood by.  

They were cowed by the dominant political frame of the era: If you didn’t agree with Bush and his policies, you were suspect and not a real American. That is probably one of Bush’s most enduring political legacies and on display this week at the laughable and desperate spectacle in Dallas.  

Time can heal wounds, and Bush’s post-presidential life has been redeeming. His refusal to make the “War on Terror” a “War on Islam” was strategically shrewd but also a graceful gesture toward a billion humans. He was no bigot, and his views on immigration look positively progressive these days.  

But future historians will judge him unkindly, as they should. 

He wasted the heroism and sacrifice of untold Americans, even as today we honor that heroism and sacrifice, as we should. 

Have a great weekend. JPC