The morning after I saw the movie, the first thing I saw was the results of the latest Newsweek poll. President Bush hit a new low after his State of the Union speech, nose-diving to a 30 percent approval rating. Even more telling: 58 percent of Americans say they wish the Bush presidency were simply over. Anything; just end the pain.
Of course, the president might have wished to stay as silent as the queen did back in 1997, right after Diana's death. But it wasn't just constitutional requirements that had him talking about what he wants to do in Iraq, the troop surge and all that. Sadly, it seems that he actually thought people not only wanted to hear it, but also that they could be convinced by it. Instead, they just hunched up their shoulders and shrank back into the couch, with that sick-nasty taste in the mouth that comes from watching those early moments in American Idol, when some poor bastard doesn't even realize how badly he's humiliating himself. The queen's silence indicates how badly out of touch she is; the president's speech does the same.
That's the charitable interpretation, at least. And probably the correct one, at least in Elizabeth's case. Something else might have been going on with the president.
Perhaps the president never thought that the American people would listen to him, then collectively nod and say, "Send more troops? Yeah, let's." That's not what the speech was for. It wasn't a sales pitch for a plan, at least not one that President Bush ever thought had the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of being implemented. The Republican congressmen who today are strolling across the deck toward the lifeboats, tomorrow will be clawing their way into them—all except McCain, who's jumping up and down for his chance behind the rudder, long after this particular ship has struck the iceberg.
Perhaps it wasn't the plan that was being promoted by Bush's speech. Perhaps it was the cover story.
Any time you lose a war—and Bush and everyone in the White House probably knows better than you do that the U.S. has cratered this one—an explanation is required. You can't just say, "Well, it was a stupid idea from the beginning." The historians will do that much for you. If it was such a good idea, with so much at stake, and with such a cakewalk certainty of success, what went wrong?
There were a lot of Germans brooding about exactly that after the end of the first World War, when the Treaty of Versailles had been crammed down their throats. And, of course, the explanation embraced by legions of veterans, in their worn-out army boots and shabby de-mob trenchcoats, nodding over their steins in Munich's damp cellar bierstuben, was the stab in the back. We would have won if it hadn't been for the traitors in our midst. The ones who wanted Germany defeated and humiliated—usually on the left—they did it. A knife between the shoulder blades. The army would have won, if they had been allowed to—or so they told themselves.
That's the talking point that our president might have been preparing for himself, to be endlessly mouthed when he takes on the much more desirable job of ex-president a couple of years from now. The mess is coming, a worse mess than before, and it won't be just Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi making sure that it's got George Bush's signature tattooed all over it. So an excuse is needed, something to be recited to reporters while clearing brush on the ranch down in Crawford, Texas. It's not my fault. We would've won if we'd stayed the course. We would've won if we'd sent more troops. But we were stabbed in the back. And so forth, long after anybody still wants to listen.
Elizabeth, at least as portrayed by Helen Mirren, gets our sympathies for being dislocated in time, somebody from another gentler, more reticent world blinking in the sudden harsh sunlight of ours. But then, the monarchy is a lifetime job for her, though the movie makes the point that her traumatic childhood memory of her uncle Edward's abdication, so he could bed a commoner, led to her holding on to the orb and scepter long after she should have turned everything over to her son Charles. It's hard to believe that George Bush got comparably out of touch with the American people in just six years, so badly that he thought he could actually get his new Iraq game plan to fly with us.
There's a difference between anachronism and simple lying. Elizabeth's silence, when the British people wanted her to say something, was at least genuinely motivated. She thought they wanted something else—a calm, regal silence—because that was what they would have wanted, back in the world she came from and that she believed everybody still lived in.
The president, on the other hand, might not be out of touch with us at all. He might perfectly understand what we want, which is just out, as in Load the troops aboard the transports and head for home. The speech, the plan, the surge—a good salesman, or at least a smart one, doesn't bother making a sales pitch this long after he can see that it's not going to go over with the customer. He just packs up his samples kit and heads for home as well. So not a pitch, but a cover story. An excuse, a claim for betrayal rather than failure. You'll be hearing it quite a lot, starting a couple of years from now, no matter how much you would prefer silence.