Bush on tape / The president survives a secret recording

Looks like, much to the chagrin of the left, the President comes through these "secret" recordings as the same as the public man. I would suspect that the NY Times is not all that happy with what they purchased. - Sailor

Editorial: Bush on tape / The president survives a secret recording
Thursday, February 24, 2005

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

With friends like these, who needs enemies? That old adage has lost a bit of its sting thanks to Doug Wead, who traded on his friendship with George W. Bush in order to make secret tape recordings of his musings before he ran for president.

But this betrayal is more a squib than a blockbuster. In its report on the tapes on Sunday, The New York Times observed that the "private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush."

Indeed, he does. As reported by the Times, the tapes -- the authenticity of which has not challenged by the White House -- provide few surprises. To be sure, political calculations never look good in the harsh light of day, but the picture of George Bush that emerges is only mildly unflattering.

That may be because Mr. Wead has released only some of the tapes, and the American people can go on only what has been released. The message the tapes convey about Mr. Bush is that what you see is what you get.

The most interesting aspect may be the discussion of what he calls "just, you know, wild behavior" -- behavior that has long been thought by critics to include drug use. At one point, Mr. Bush seems to say that he used marijuana in the past, although it is also possible he was speaking hypothetically.

This excerpt may shock some of his religious supporters while being completely unsurprising to most other Americans. But even here, Mr. Bush's reluctance to talk about his past actually comes off in a sympathetic light. "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions," he said. "You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."

Mr. Bush's sincere religious faith comes through clearly in the tapes, even as he positions himself to win the favor of Christian evangelicals. He is also commendably decent in his attitude to gays, saying, "I am not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?"

In his years as president, Mr. Bush has tried not to condemn individual people for being gay, but his good intentions have been confused by his position against gay marriage -- an excuse for many of his religious supporters to treat gays as the enemy, the very thing he shied away from on the tapes.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret these tapes as portraying a shallow politician of poor judgment -- of then Sen. John Ashcroft, later to be his bull-in-a-china-shop attorney general, Mr. Bush said: "I like Ashcroft a lot." He thought he would be a good Supreme Court pick, attorney general or vice president.

But at least Mr. Bush comes off as a sincere man and no hypocrite. For us, the real villain of these tapes is Doug Wead, the author who acted odiously for the sake of telling the American people very little.