Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
I often wear two hats, one as a reporter who covers Washington and the White House and as an opinion journalist who makes her living giving opinions. I am often asked why a politician responds in a certain way, ways that often make no sense to the general public.

The radio stations I report for range from conservative to liberal, with most leaning on the conservative side. Most weeks, the questions are related to why so-and-so are not in the presidential race or why someone took a particular position on a bill. This week, the questions were related to the president and the attorney general. The radio hosts, conservative and liberal alike, wanted to know why the president was hanging onto the attorney general.

There really can only be three answers. The first is that Attorney General Gonzales knows something about the president and the White House that would lead to impeachment of the president for something he did that was blatantly unconstitutional, or even criminal. Though many of my friends are convinced the president's actions regarding the war are impeachable offenses, there is no evidence that the attorney general is hiding information about the war. I can't believe that Gonzales really has anything on President Bush that we don't already know about.

The second reason is that the president has only 18 months in his term, and a nomination fight in the Senate would bring all of the dysfunction of the Justice Department, as well as failed policies, front and center in the evening news. The "parade of horribles" would include spying on Americans, high staff turnover and how polices are made at Main Justice. Not exactly what the Bush administration would like to have sitting in front of Joe and Sally America.

The third is that the president has a real personality flaw. I ascribe to this theory. Given the week's events and the testimony of the attorney general before the Senate Judiciary committee, there is no senior manager I know who would hold on to him. Gonzales's testimony was completely contradicted by FBI director Robert Mueller. Mueller said it was about the terrorist surveillance program, and the attorney general said there was no departmental disagreement. This is on top of hours and hours of evasive testimony concerning the scandal on the firings of the U.S. attorneys. Then we have the midnight visit to the former attorney general in his hospital room and the lies he told about that. If that was not enough for the president to send a pink slip to Gonzales, then how about the huge staff turnover at Main Justice? Liar or lousy manager, he just doesn't belong there.

So why does the president hang on? It can only be his personality structure. Many people LOVE this about the president. He means what he says and says what he means. He won't back down etc. etc. This is what got him elected but makes him a poor president. There are many theories as to why he is like this, and historians and psychologists will be arguing for years to come about President Bush's personality. My summation is that he is a classic dry drunk – someone who is an untreated, but dry, alcoholic often referred to in Alcoholic's Anonymous as "white knuckle sobriety". Basically, someone whose obsessive compulsive personality kept him drinking, denying reality, seeing the world in a very rigid manner and often thinking in a grandiose fashion. There are a few other characteristics of this kind of sobriety, and one of them is extreme rationalization.

Looking at the attorney general situation and meshing that with the president's personality, it becomes clear that even in the face of opposition in his own party, even in the face of facts of bad management, the president holds on. He is denying reality, holding on to his appointed choice for the job with a rigidity rarely seen in politics or business management. He believes in a very grandiose fashion that, as president, he can thumb his nose at the will of Congress. Had the president received treatment for alcoholism 20 years ago, he would have been introduced to the ways and means of the Serenity Prayer. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference." With Congress calling for a special prosecutor for the nation's top cop and an impending Constitutional battle, we could all be saved from this mess. If only the president had courage to change and the wisdom that went along with it.