Politics: "That way son" - G. W. Bush goes back to daddy for help

In an interesting article in England's "The Sunday Times", of November 12, 2006, Andrew Sullivan writes about George W.'s Bush humiliation in the Congress elections and how he has slunk back to Dad for help. It's "Shakespeare meets Freud", he says ...

"The events of last week in America have an almost Shakespearean quality to them. It’s like some ghastly conflation of Richard II’s doom-laden “Down, down, I come” and Richard III’s “winter of our discontent”. Richard II is how Bush would like the world to see him — a king of noble motives brought low by injustice and fate. Richard III is . . . well, ask Karl Rove, the hunch in W’s back. At the centre of this epic psycho-political drama is a royal family of sorts in a war for survival: the Bush dynasty, a story of a father and his son, their tortured relationship and what they have had to do to survive.

Last week George W Bush was forced back — once again — to the protective arms of his father. They call the first President Bush “Poppy” in the family (...). His first son always lived in his shadow — both deeply admiring him and deeply resenting him, the way dauphins often do their monarchs. (...) Last week the dream [G. W. Bush's] collapsed in the sands of Anbar and the voting booths of the Midwest. The first son, who always wanted to make a name for himself, to escape the suffocating legacy of a presidential father, was forced by the American people to go back to Poppy. (…)

In his latest book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward is clear about the long-held animosity between Poppy and Rummy [Rumsfeld]. They couldn’t stand each other. “Bush senior thought Rumsfeld was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian. (...) If you want to know why Bush Jr held onto Rumsfeld longer than any sane person should have, one clue lies in the paternal relationship. Surrendering Rumsfeld means that Poppy was right. (…)

George W was the first son, but never the favoured one, of the Bush dynasty. Jeb, his younger brother, was always going to be president. W was the loser, the joker, the wastrel. But W was also, in his heart, desperate to emulate his father, while too driven by his own ego to listen to him. He desperately both wanted approval and just as desperately wanted to be free and independent.(...)"

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