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"Read my lips!" cries Bush. "No . . . new . . . taxes!" Read my lips. George Bush is ever at odds with language, as if he does not regard it as a reliable vehicle of thought. At his worst moments on the stump, his surreal moments, Bush is a sort of amateur terrorist of language, like an eleven-year- old Shi'ite picking up a Kalashnikov assault rifle for the first time and firing off words in wild bursts, blowing out the lamps, sending the relatives diving through the windows. Bush is mostly oblivious to the nuances of language, as if some moral or cultural dyslexia were knotting up the thought (which may explain why he keeps using oafishly wrong expressions like "read my lips" and "kick a little ass"). He seems to regard words as dangerous, potentially treacherous. Odd: it is a tenet of conservative intellectuals that "ideas have consequences." Bush sometimes sounds as if he regards ideas, and words, as an inconvenience and an irritation -- perverse, buzzing little demons that need to be brushed away periodically like flies.
Sometimes Bush's speech has a chameleon quality. One day during a tour through central Illinois farmland, Bush and his wife Barbara rode in a bus with the country singers Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue, all sisters. At a stop in the town of Wenona, Bush told the crowd that the three sisters had been giving a country concert in the bus, and "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven." George Bush, out of Kennebunkport and Houston, out of Andover and Yale, had a little mountain twang in his voice when he said it, standing in twill trousers and a cowboy shirt. Loretta Lynn, the coal miner's daughter out of Butcher's Hollow, Ky., told the crowd she loves George Bush " 'cuz he's country!"
No, he is not. George Bush is a man who seems to be searching for the country. He sometimes seems to have misplaced America, and to be intently seeking it, trying out different accents, different styles of thought, as if seeking his own authenticity. Or perhaps fleeing it. Bush used to be a moderate Republican. Now, inheriting the Reagan legacy, he is constrained to run as a right-winger. He trumpets right-wing "values" -- and panders unapologetically to the Know-Nothing instincts in the crowd, but one listens to him always with a smudge of doubt: Does he really believe that?
Bush went from patrician Connecticut to the Texas oil fields as a young man; he has gone from moderate Republican to right-wing Republican, from one identity to another, from one appointive office to another, and these transitions seem at last to add up to a sense of permanent motion and quest, of search for something that is finally his own. It is possible, of course, that after so many years, he is closing in upon that something right now, and will discover both America and himself in the most spectacular way.
DUKAKIS: FORCE OF GRAVITY
Bush is a puzzling man. Dukakis, in an equally troubling way, seems an unpuzzling man. Study the way that the two men walk. If the candidates would not disclose themselves in other ways, they would surely express a little of themselves thus.
Dukakis trudges. He is a compact and gravid man, like a wrestler, with feet apart and stance wary, as if afraid of being knocked down. He is a man careful beyond the ordinary standards of prudence. He holds the railing tightly as he descends the stairs from an airplane.