In The Shadow of Bush

The current crop of presidential contenders may be only marginally more realistic than Bush in their self-assessments. Voters will have to look closely and ask whether the candidate who preens so confidently on the trail will behave with appropriate humility in the Oval Office. It is often hard to tell whether a good candidate will make a good president. But the small self-delusions of their campaign posturings can offer hints about how self-aware they'll later turn out to be.

Giuliani starred in a movie—a disaster film—we all remember too well. His calm and cool presence on 9/11 should be honored. But under scrutiny from the press, Giuliani's record has looked shakier. Why had the mayor of New York City located his crisis-command center in the World Trade Center—a well-known target that had been bombed by terrorists in 1993? And why couldn't the mayor who slashed crime in the city—no easy feat—perform the simple task of making sure the radios worked between the cops and the firefighters? Giuliani's response to questions about his leadership seems essentially to bluff and deny. He blames technological and bureaucratic obstacles for the problems with the radios. It is not reassuring that in New York City, the mayor's top aides and advisers were known as "Yes Rudies."

Mitt Romney is selling himself as Mr. Fix-It. He is the can-do guy from the world of business who will come in and repair the mess inside the Beltway. There is something practical about Romney; he does not seem to be unduly weighed down by ideology. On the other hand, he has been a little too eager to do whatever it takes to get elected. He clumsily flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights, intending first to please the voters of Massachusetts, where he served as governor from 2003 to 2007, then to appease the politically powerful religious right in the presidential campaign. Speaking through gleamingly white teeth, he has also rearranged his personal past, claiming to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (the two men were not even in the same city on the date in question). Romney later quibbled about the meaning of the word "saw," saying he used it in a "figurative sense."

Mike Huckabee has been in sales all his life, embarking on his career as an evangelical minister as a teenager. He has been an effective reaper of souls for the Lord, in part because he is more folksy and self-deprecating than bombastic. But his show of Christian remorse over a negative ad on the eve of the Iowa caucuses was greeted with hoots of derision. At a press conference, Huckabee played for guffawing reporters the ad he was pulling from the airwaves—thus guaranteeing it would be seen by millions of people on YouTube and the nightly news free of charge, without costing the strapped Huckabee campaign a penny. It is possible that Huckabee had made the classic mistake of falling in with cynical campaign consultants—especially his top adviser, Ed Rollins, a former boxer who delights in smash-mouth political gamesmanship.

John McCain may be showing more integrity than his rivals, which in a typical presidential campaign amounts to stepping over a fairly low bar. After suffering for five and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, beaten and starved and forced into a phony "confession," McCain gives off the aura of a man who has nothing left to lose. Still, in October, when he entered the race as the front runner looking to shore up the support of the GOP establishment, he almost wrecked his campaign by pandering to the religious right. (McCain claimed, falsely, that the Constitution established the United States as a "Christian nation.") Since then, he has recovered his honest voice and made a virtue, of a kind, out of his unflinching support for the war in Iraq. In the Senate, colleagues sometimes warily regard McCain as a hothead. An impulsive, impetuous president could be dangerous. A key question is whether McCain calms down and listens after corking off; the anecdotal evidence on that seems to be mixed. He does have the capacity to apologize and forgive, and he has shown an unusual ability to reach across the aisle on controversial issues like fuel-emissions standards and campaign-finance and immigration-reform laws.

It is perhaps too easy to poke through the statements and campaign literature of candidates who are dizzy with exhaustion and caught up in a desperate race. In 2000, Al Gore was unfairly mocked as the man who claimed to have "invented" the Internet and served as the model for the hero of "Love Story." A recent Vanity Fair article, "Going After Gore," showed how Bill Clinton's former vice president became the victim of a jaundiced press corps as well as his own tendency to exaggerate. Still, the candidate who wins the 2008 election will be tempted to become less, not more, honest once he or she reaches the Oval Office. As soon as the pundits and the Washington insiders start baying and growling outside the White House gates (a process that starts on the afternoon of Inauguration Day), all presidents feel a desire to build a moat, if not pour boiling oil into the press room on the lower level of the West Wing.