posted on June 27, 2001 02:26:45 PM new
Where Sammy Sosa Meets Vladimir Putin
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, June 27, 2001; Page A25
"I looked the man in the eye; I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul. . . . He's an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values."
-- George W. Bush, June 16, 2001, on Russian President Vladimir Putin
"Mr. Putin was far from deserving the powerful political prestige and influence that comes from an excessively personal endorsement by the president of the United States."
-- Sen. Jesse M. Helms, June 20, 2001
To understand what put Sen. Helms in such a tizzy that he felt compelled to publicly spank a president of his own party, you have to first consider the matter of Sammy Sosa.
In 1989, Sammy Sosa played for the Texas Rangers, a baseball team partially owned by one George W. Bush. Bush, who had only recently been made the Rangers' chief executive and who had much to learn, took a sense of Sosa's soul and traded him to the Chicago White Sox. Considering that nine years later with the Chicago Cubs, Sosa was in a chase for the home run record, this was a mistake.
To further grasp the implications of Bush's judgment of Putin, and of Helms's unhappiness over that judgment, you have to consider that baseball was something with which Bush had some experience. He came from a baseball family -- his father played for Yale; his great-uncle George Herbert Walker once owned 6 percent of the New York Mets -- and he had played the game himself in Little League and on a varsity level at prep school. He was a lifelong avid fan, and he would turn out to be a natural at running a ball team.
As the Putin example shows, Bush puts great stock in his gut instinct -- his ability to look into other people's eyes (he is forever talking about this) and getting a sense of their souls. As the Sosa example shows, he is quite capable of getting the sense completely wrong -- even where he is knowledgeable.
Now you come to the presidency, Russia and Putin. Here, inarguably, Bush knows very little. He cannot know a lot (at least firsthand) about being president, because he has not been president for very long. He cannot know a lot about Russia, because he has never been there. He cannot know a lot about Putin, because he had never met him before this month's trip.
So what you have here is a situation in which a prudent man would begin by knowing his limitations -- by admitting ignorance, proceeding with study and basing eventual judgments on facts, not first impressions.
Vladimir Putin may be, as Bush feels, an honest, straightforward guy with a perfectly swell soul who loves his family. On the other hand, he indisputably is a guy who was willing to crush a rebellion in Chechnya with vast and murderous force, to shut down the only independent television network when that network criticized his government, to violate arms-control treaties and to continue Russia's practice of selling arms to states hostile to the United States. Also, he spent most of his career in the service of the Soviet Union's KGB, which calls the quality-of-soul claim into some doubt.
The worrisome thing about Bush is not, as his reactionary critics have it, that he is an idiot who can't get anything right. He has, especially in foreign policy, gotten it mostly right. He effectively warned China not to try to eat Taiwan, which may avert a war. He moved the international conversation on global warming out of a dead end by burying the Kyoto protocol. He insisted on moving ahead with a necessary missile defense against rogue nations. He has made these decisions largely, it seems, on gut, and his gut serves him well.
No, what is worrisome is that Bush -- and in this he seems dangerously to resemble the foreign-policy-disaster-prone John F. Kennedy -- does not seem to understand, or care about, the limits of gut. He does not seem to want to bother with the tedious business of study and fact-assessment that is the process by which right decisions are most often arrived at -- which is even then not so often. He does not seem to want to work at the thing.
The idea that he does not know what he does not know does not seem to ever occur to Bush. This is a problem and one that is a great deal more consequential in the case of Putin than in the case of Sosa.
posted on June 27, 2001 03:06:51 PM new
Sad thing is, if WE know how dopey the President is, I bet the other world leaders have caught on as well. At least Putin's diplomatic!
posted on June 27, 2001 03:24:30 PM new
I guess I don't get it.
Let's see...
Claim is made that Bush has no foreign policy skills. Bush goes to Europe and praises the leader of Russia. After all, shouldn't the first meeting between these two be a warm one. Isn't that what we want?
On the flip side, say Bush came back and claimed that Putin was a cold, hard character, an enemy of the US. Surely I'd hear once again that Bush has no foreign policy skills.
So, what should he have said. Critical because he had positive things to say about the Russian President. My, my. What are we coming to? We've labeled him dopey for his assessment of ...an honest, straightforward man who loves his country.
And BTW, any sports fan knows that any good owner of a sports team lets the General Manager make the personnel moves.
While the comparison comes from a reputable source, how can one conceivably compare the gut reactions of these two events?
posted on June 27, 2001 03:30:54 PM new
Read again what Jesse Helms said. It's rare that I agree with Jesse Helms. Bush didn't say "this is a man I can work with". He positively gushed about him. Also, as you've pointed out, this article was written by a highly sympathetic source.
How can the comparison be made? I don't think it was meant to be a literal point by point analogy. It was just an illustration.
posted on June 27, 2001 03:36:40 PM new
I agree, Donny. I've changed my assessment of him slightly. As I've siad before on these pages, low expectations are his best friend. However, in this case I do think he missed the mark completely.
posted on June 27, 2001 03:54:53 PM new
How cute, deuce, to claim loftily to present an international perspective when your source relies on it's partnership with the Wasington Post and secondarily the New York Times, both decidedly sympathetic to the administration.
posted on June 27, 2001 04:01:41 PM new
Ken, I agree that the assessment of the 'world leaders' turned out not to be so bad. Maybe they're just being prudent, I don't know, but they did say he didn't match what they read about him in the papers.
Uaru:
[ edited by jamesoblivion on Jun 27, 2001 04:02 PM ]
Hmm... now how did I read 'deuce' as 'donny'? It must be the drugs...
[ edited by jamesoblivion on Jun 27, 2001 04:06 PM ]
posted on June 27, 2001 04:03:28 PM new
Putin was so favorably impressed that he's been threatening to increase his country's capability to blow us off the face of the earth ever since.
posted on June 27, 2001 04:04:00 PM new How cute, deuce, to claim loftily to present an international perspective when your source relies on it's partnership with the Wasington Post and secondarily the New York Times, both decidedly sympathetic to the administration.
Are you claiming that the IHT is not an Intl paper? They have their own writers (such as the author of the cited piece) and are supplemented by the Times and the Post. Let's see, main offices in France, Hong Kong, London & US. I'd say that is an international rag. How was this cute?
posted on June 27, 2001 04:31:08 PM new
Some cut & pastes from the same site as Snowyegret's posts:
If NMD can be made to work as a genuinely multilateral technical framework to replace an increasingly failing diplomatic one, would not the wiser course be to consider it on its merits, rather than dismissing it out of hand?
&
Perhaps we Europeans should rely a little less on the old 80s kneejerk opposition to this proposition and look a little closer, not at what, but rather at how, it might be done.
posted on June 27, 2001 07:13:31 PM new
Dang. "Spanking the President." I thought this was going to be a thread about a sex game all us plump chicks could play with Clinton. What a let-down.
posted on June 27, 2001 09:47:10 PM new
deuce, are you saying you think President Bush knows what he's doing?
What about his meeting with P.M. Sharon? Sharon sounded pretty firm on his stance against the Palestinians, while Bush just sat there looking like he needed to pee.
