Via this week’s Newsweek backpage essay, George Will ponders a portion of Alberto Gonzales’ farewell speech:
And speaking of the tone-deaf, Alberto Gonzales could not even leave high office without advertising his unfitness for it. As he habitually has done, he reminded the nation that he has “lived the American Dream,” which he evidently thinks is epitomized by his success in attaching himself to a politician not known for demanding quality in assistants. Gonzales then demonstrated how uncomprehending he is of essential American values. He said: “Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days.”
Well. His father married and had eight children—nine wonderful days, days even better, one would have thought, than any of the days his son spent floundering at the Justice Department. Furthermore, Gonzales’s father had the fulfillment of a lifetime spent providing for his family. But what is any of that, Gonzales implies, compared with the satisfaction of occupying, however unsatisfactorily, a high office? This implicit disparagement of his father’s life of responsibility and self-sufficiency turns conservatism inside out. It is going to take conservatism a while to recuperate from becoming associated with such people.
When I heard Gonzales’ comments about his father I, too, thought them odd. I took Gonzales to be saying that his work was less physically demanding than his father’s, but still it did seem that it would have been more appropriate to extol his father’s hard work and his father’s contributions to the son’s successes, rather than an odd comparison of the two men’s working lives. At a minimum, Will is right: this was at best an example of Gonzales’ unartful prose.
Even if one thinks that Will is reading too much into the statement (and I must admit, I see something in the theory that Gonzales was revealing an unhealthy attachment to power–a problem that this admin certainly has had), there is little doubt that he is utterly correct about that last sentence bolded above.
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September 5th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I am not sure where Will is coming from by claiming that Gonzales’ comments about hi father “turns conservatism inside out.”
Gonzo seemed to express the same disdain for the working class which has been the epitome of conservatism since Reagan.
Gonzo, in his comments, was being quintessentially conservative.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:23 am
It depend, I suppose, on one’s definition of “conservative.”
Will’s point has validity if we assume that he is coming from the point of view of that strand of American conservatism that focuses on the virtues of the individual and especially the ability of the individual to achieve through hard work.