Did George W Bush "Beget" Barack Obama?

Consider this, if you will: There is something unmistakably Old Testament-ish about the way we Americans pick our presidents. Consider the 2000 election, when by a two-to-one margin, voters judged the country to be "headed in the right direction" and the term-limited Bill Clinton enjoyed a 65 percent favorable job rating from his constituents. Yet to an electorate disillusioned and dispirited by disclosures about presidential lies, lewdness and self-indulgence, George W. Bush's pledge to restore "dignity to the Oval Office" had understandable appeal. It can be said that Bill Clinton "begat" George W. Bush.

Twenty years earlier, Jimmy Carter, then at risk of becoming the first American president to have his job-rating fall below the prime interest rate and viewed as a leader who too often changed his mind made possible the election of the ideological leader of the nation's distinctly minority party, Ronald Reagan — who hadn't changed his mind since at least 1964.

Carter "begat" Reagan, just as the impeached and disgraced Richard Nixon begat the truth-telling and pristine Jimmy Carter. American voters have a habit of seeking those very qualities or characteristics in their new president that were missing in the previous president who disappointed them.

Could George Bush in 2008 "beget" Barack Obama? The Illinois senator, unlike the incumbent, is not the child of privilege or power. He is the son raised outside the continental United States by a single mother. Candidate Bush falsely billed himself as a "uniter, not a divider." In office, he has pursued policies of unyielding partisanship, which has contributed to a polarized politics. Barack Obama preaches the value of — and pledges himself to — seeking common ground through bipartisanship.

In an untypical public display of self-deprecation, the president acknowledged his own fractured syntax with the line, "George W. Bush's lips are where words go to die." Bush does not read newspapers; Obama writes inspiring best-sellers.

Isn't Obama, after only two years in the U.S.

Senate, too green and inexperienced to be president? Here again, Bush provides a helpful counterpoint. Recall his original national security team — Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, along with professionals such as Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage — literally with centuries of on-the-job training. Together, they took the American people into a war without justification or end and into a world almost without allies. The Bush national security team managed to give experience a bad name.

To Harold Pachios of Maine, a onetime assistant press secretary in Lyndon Johnson's White House and more recently chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the mixed-race Obama is the antidote to the United States' current isolation in the world. "His election," argues Pachios, "would be an unmistakable statement to the world about who we, Americans, really are — a broad-minded and large-hearted people. And, I'm confident, we would soon see profound, positive changes in attitudes toward the United States."

The Illinois Democrat reminds professor Robert Schmuhl of the University of Notre Dame of another American political leader who was born in Illinois: Ronald Reagan. Both men, he observes, were shaped by the dominance of their mothers in their formative years, had previous careers outside of politics, endured humbling election defeats and were endowed with a magical charisma that enables them to attract and inspire others. Reagan and Obama, Schmuhl writes in the Chicago Tribune, both "speak American, the distinctive dialect of the nation's ideals and values."

Nationally respected pollster Peter D. Hart, whose career began in 1964 with Lou Harris, calls Obama "the most electrifying political figure I have seen in 40 years — since Robert Kennedy. Politically, he is a 10,000 watt bulb."

Will that coruscating brilliance last for the next 20 years or be gone in 20 months? Nobody knows.

But after 20 uninterrupted years of presidents named Bush and Clinton and a lot of sour yesterdays, an Obama candidacy is potentially about the possibility of tomorrow. And if it were to come to pass, it could honestly be said that George W. Bush "begat" Barack Obama.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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COPYRIGHT 2007 MARK SHIELDS