The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Jesse is a poet. He looks and listens to America, to his aides and even to reporters. Their feelings, their moods, their words flow through his system. His lines come from his soul, and they have swirled around deep down in there, marinated in his special anger and ambition, sometimes for weeks. Then he speaks them into a tape recorder and hears them come back at him. And he tunes them and times them, then lofts them to the misty-eyed worshipers who are swept with him into the clouds.

Mario is a poet too. A man of immigrant parents, soaked in the American dream since birth. Man of the melting pot with big hands and arms and mind, who crouches and sweeps and roars in political iambic pentameter and some free verse. A man still surprised that he is Governor of New York and talked about for President of the U.S. It is the stuff of song.

Mike is a word processor. Hmmmmmm. Click, click, click. Paragraphs from that fellow over there, thoughts from that woman opposite. Phrases from pleasant platitudes past and present. Committee review. Clip and paste. Put this up there, that down here. Reassemble it all in a white plastic machine and then read it.

It took the practiced ear of Richard Nixon to tell us that. Give him his due. He's got a feel for the pols, and he can sum them up with a brutal line or two. On Meet the Press a few weeks ago, Anchor Tom Brokaw asked if Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the leading Democratic presidential contender, was just "too dull to be an effective nominee." Nixon was ready, dark flash from the eyes. "Let me answer that question this way. I've often said that the best politics is poetry rather than prose. Jesse Jackson is a poet. Cuomo is a poet. And Dukakis is a word processor."

This sort of talk gladdens the heart of Peggy Noonan. She is the hired poet of George Bush, trying to turn the inner impulses of the Vice President into words that soar. "Government is words," says Noonan. "Thoughts are reduced to paper for speeches which become policy. Poetry has everything to do with speeches -- cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep, a knowledge that words are magic, that words like children have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart."

Noonan once wrote for Dan Rather ("Autumn has dropped like a fruit") and then became Ronald Reagan's best lyricist ("The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them"). "When she left, the | Great Communicator sang no more," said Michael Horowitz, former counsel of OMB. George Bush tapped Noonan's talents, and she came up with his best line yet: "We have earned our optimism, we have a right to our confidence, and we have much to do."

On her remarkable journey from being a Newark secretary to one of the capital's pre-eminent political poets, she has acquired a dashing husband with an eye patch, Richard Rahn, an economist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a ten-month-old son with eyes as blue as the evening sky. And something else -- a facsimile machine that rests on her kitchen cabinet just above little Will's playpen. He is fascinated with its rustling paper, the paper of poetry. Noonan pecks the words out in the next room and feeds them into this electronic umbilical, and they emerge in Bush's speeches in Seattle and San Diego, fragments of silver in a year of political dross.

Poetry, as Jackson and Cuomo and Nixon and Noonan know, will not remedy an empty mind or a cold heart. But if all other factors are reasonably balanced, the man who learns how to make the most beanbags dance will probably be the next President.