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These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For
13 December 2004The Washington Post's Alan Cooperman pays for a Key West junket with a puff piece about Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, the man behind the God in the president's rhetoric. "At a meeting with reporters in Key West, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday [an annual retreat hosted by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center], Gerson, who has crafted almost all of Bush's major speeches since 2000 but has rarely spoken to the media, defended the president's religious rhetoric. Although the session was off the record, Gerson subsequently agreed to allow some of his main points to appear in print." Sure, why not? Not as if there'd be any serious accountability. "[O]n the whole, the speechwriter argued, Bush's references to the role of providence in human affairs have been carefully calibrated and fully within the tradition of American civic religion." Leaving aside Bush's critics, if that assertion is so, why do so many millions of Bush supporters see in their man a servant of God unlike any previous occupant of the oval office? And why does Prof. David Domke's analysis of 70 years of presidential rhetoric reveal a marked shift toward the prophetic in Bush's speeches?
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