L.A. Weekly editor/columnist John Powers surveys the landscape of George W. Bush's America and finds it littered with frothing liberals, sneering conservatives, sluggish reporters, and mindless commentators. From reality TV to the "embedded media," Powers dissects the post-9/11 milieu with something bordering on glee. Brooks can't help but be repulsed by journalists who are as incompetent and slothful as they are ideologically driven. True, our leaders are failing us at our time of greatest need. But, hey, he gets to write about this stuff! With sharp, snappy, self-confident prose, Powers delights in devastating the likes of Ann Coulter (engaging in debate with the strident right-winger "can only make you dumber"), Bill O’Reilly (pegged as a man who pens "short books with very large print"), and "serial bigot" Michael Savage. Not that the left escapes unscathed. The progressive mag The Nation is "profoundly dreary" and Fox's opposition voice Alan Colmes is dismissed as a "quasiliberal munchkin." Still, it's the incessantly wronged right (despite holding the White House, Congress, Supreme Court) that defines this era of "sore winners"--and for them the sometime NPR commentator reserves his bitterest bon mots. Powers is an adept essayist who, in contrast to, say, David Brooks, is as surefooted writing about culture as he is about politics. His breadth of interests and store of on-target epithets make for provocative reading for those on both sides of the great divide. --Steven Stolder


From Publishers Weekly
From Bush's infamous "how dare you ask Chirac a question in French" press conference to Colin and Condi as tokenism writ large, L.A. Weekly deputy editor Powers marshals a host of sometimes obvious, media-based critiques in portraying Bush & co. as "sore winners," the products of a populist, social Darwinist culture where doing what you want because you can is OK. Episodic chapters veer in too many directions, incorporating pre-cooked chunks of presidential media history, myriad literary and pop culture allusions (everything from Robert Musil and Preston Sturges to Alice Sebold and Courtney Love) and even Powers's decidedly layman's assessment of what he deems (sore winner) Rumsfeld's lack of planning for postwar Iraq. But Powers's deconstructions of Bush-era political coverage, though too predictable when dealing with the right, have marked range and subtlety when discussing the left's attempts at fighting back. He's best, though, on the sore winner–effect writ large, describing a kind of flip side of the late '90s Bobos in Paradise: a mean-spirited, you-deserve-it mentality that Powers finds in everything from American Splendor to American Idol. Powers can be very funny (as when advocating an "irony enema" for commentator Roger Rosenblatt), but scion Bush as sore winner isn't news, and the book is too thick with kitchen-sink ruminations to work as a whole. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
What we have here is a smart (at times smarty-pants) addition to and expansion upon the literature of that most un-literary enterprise, the presidential administration of George W. Bush. Like many others, John Powers is appalled by Bush and most of those by whom he is surrounded, but unlike most of Bush's critics -- Molly Ivins, Al Franken, Michael Moore et al. -- he takes Bush seriously. He understands that whatever the president's intellectual limitations, he is a representative figure who embodies, at this peculiar and scary moment in our history, aspects of the American state of mind and heart that cannot be dismissed as merely his own idiosyncrasies. Powers is news to me. I've never seen a copy of L.A. Weekly, for which he writes about culture and the media; I don't listen to NPR's "Fresh Air," for which he is a film critic; I only glance at the recipes in Gourmet, for which he is an international correspondent. The loss, Sore Winners makes plain, has been mine. He is a clever, quick-witted writer with a gift for the dead-on zinger -- the Left's answer to P.J. O'Rourke, David Brooks, Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell et al., though obviously he's seriously outnumbered -- and he seems to have read, listened to, watched and gone online with just about everything. He's a pop-culture omnivore who understands that, like Bush, pop culture has to be taken seriously and that, unlikely though it may seem, there are connections between the two that command attention. This surely is not the result of any conscious, deliberate undertaking on the president's part. Apart from his genuine love of baseball, Bush seems almost completely unconnected to the popular culture that, it can be argued, is this country's most important domestic product and most successful export. As all presidents do, he makes the obligatory gestures -- to country music, to NASCAR, to pro football -- but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. He makes a big deal of telling anyone who asks that he doesn't read the newspapers, but he doesn't seem to give significantly more attention to television, the movies, music or anything else that pours forth from pop culture's bottomless cornucopia.Yet, Powers argues, "love him or loathe him, he is the political figure who defines our time, and like John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan before him, he casts a long shadow over our culture," the "polarized culture of unreality over which Bush rules." At the outset of what Powers describes as "a portrait of Bush's presidency -- a critical portrait, although I would like to think not an hysterical one," he writes: "We see his fractured image reflected all around us -- in the rise of Fox News, the popularity of Darwinian game shows, the ubiquity of the neocon pundits, the left's crippling nostalgia, the reemergence of Cold War braggadocio, the $400 million box-office of 'The Passion of the Christ,' the celebration of consumerism as self-expression, and the color-coded algebra of fear that has become part of every American's psyche. If you put together the President's policies, the artificiality of our political discourse, the shrieking of our pop culture, and the babble of information that bombards us every day, you have the unreal reality I think of as Bush World." A central characteristic of Bush World, as Powers sees it, is summarized in his title. The distance between haves and have-nots grows ever wider, and those at the top of the heap have more than most of us can imagine or comprehend, yet: "Today's Winners don't simply win, they win badly: bragging, sneering, lording it over the Losers, and promoting themselves with a crassness that would leave Duddy Kravitz blushing. When Hurricane Isabel knocks out the power in much of Washington, D.C., the Redskins' billionaire owner doesn't just get a huge generator to restore his own electricity but turns on all his lights, so that his house glows like the Vegas strip while his annoyed neighbors sit in the dark." This newspaper has been reporting for months about "Red" and "Blue" America. Powers sees the division in somewhat different terms -- "Us" and "Them," "Winners" and "Losers" -- but it boils down to the same thing, a nation bitterly divided and presided over by a president who exploits and deliberately exacerbates those divisions for partisan ends. Powers is absolutely right that the events of September 2001 gave Bush a rich opportunity that he calculatedly spurned: "This remains his single most startling failure as president. September 11 hadn't merely legitimized his controversial ascension to office, it had offered him the chance to govern as a figure of national unity, defending the nation from malignant outsiders. Yet given a political gift that any other politician would kill for, he managed to turn the country even more bitterly divided than he'd found it." The objection can be raised that it is far from clear whether Bush is the cause or the product of this division -- after all, as Powers himself leaves no doubt, there are divisions in the country not directly attributable to politics about which Bush seems never to have given a moment's thought -- but the connection is self-evident: A divided country has a president who fosters division as a political strategy. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that Americans are possessed by "feelings of frustration, impotence, and rage" in "a time when hysteria has replaced politics and consumption passes for social action," but there's no denying that the popular mood is ugly or that the president's "compassionate conservatism is content with a two-tier society whose levels drift farther apart all the time." Powers writes: "America is increasingly a country where Winners' kids attend private schools and the Losers' go to fading public ones, where Winners shop at specialty grocers and Losers buy their food at Wal-Mart or Costco, where Winners fly business or first class while Losers are stuck in economy sections and treated with flagrant, lunch-in-a-doggie-bag contempt, where Winners choose from a smorgasbord of jobs and Losers like Jessica Lynch enlist in the military because they couldn't get a job at Wal-Mart. . . . While Bush didn't create this situation, his policies are making the divisions far more extreme." What's truly peculiar -- and what Powers rather mysteriously never really comes to terms with -- is that in a nation the considerable majority of whose residents are Losers as defined above, the winner-take-all ethos is embraced by the very people who lose. "Reality" television shows (which in fact have absolutely nothing to do with reality) are "faux Darwinian games of selection, extinction, survival and victory," yet they are avidly watched by millions who lose out in real-world games every day. This is merely a rejiggered Social Darwinism, and Powers is correct to say that it "informs our pop culture, feeds the arrogance of Winners, calls down disrespect on Losers, and inspires an attitude toward celebrity that is at once slavish and embittered." Perhaps the explanation for this is that Americans still believe what Reagan loved to tell them, that this is a country where any person can become rich, and that they get vicarious pleasure from victories won by others that will always be denied to them. Perhaps. What is certain is that the opportunity for national reconciliation and unity that September 2001 provided has been blown not just by Bush and his cronies but by the country itself. Millions of Americans are poor, many of them desperately so, yet the ordinary citizens who go to the polls have no evident sympathy for them, and their plight is rarely reported by news and entertainment media that are as obsessed with celebrity, private wealth and triumphalism as the smuggest neocon. To his credit, Powers concentrates on analysis of the country's divisions and the current administration's contributions to them rather than on proposing blue-sky remedies. He is avowedly a man of the Left, but he accurately points out that the Left now is "hedged in by shibboleths and defeatism," and that what remains of it has little interest in the "muscular blend of theory and action" that once characterized it. Now the Left "is largely defined by patterns of consumption -- which magazines we read and which movies we see -- or by its newfangled ideas of organizing -- such as Howard Dean's Internet-grassroots campaign." The Left is toothless and irrelevant, steamrollered under by the neocons and a public that equates "liberal" with "wimp." So here we are, at the start of a presidential campaign in which personality and attack ads are everything, and substance is nowhere to be seen. It's going to be nasty and divisive, which these days means it's going to be all too American. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Media and cultural critic Powers, of the L.A. Weekly, boldly and entertainingly assesses public life in the "unreal reality" he calls Bush World, four years under the rule of "the sorest of winners." Just for starters, Powers portrays President Bush as a control freak with little interest in the world and "dismissive disdain" for all who disagree with him, Cheney as "the military-industrial complex made flesh," and Rumsfeld as the embodiment of "everything seductive and dangerous about American neo-imperialism." But the Bush administration would not have the power it does, Powers avers, had September 11 not happened, if the spineless press didn't kowtow to the slickest PR machine in history, and if the Left wasn't so fractious and dull. Powers lambastes the Nation for its dreariness and Fox News for its propaganda and offers exhilaratingly insightful analyses of the Darwinian extravaganzas of reality TV, Arnold Schwarzenegger's metamorphosis, Martha Stewart's fall, Michael Moore's triumph, "run-amok crony capitalism," and blog culture. With the presidential election looming, Powers' brilliant synthesis and recap is invaluable in its coherence and incisiveness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“Powers’s Sore Winners is surreally comprehensive, laserously observant, 85 percent correct, and refreshingly unshrill.”
—David Foster Wallace

“It’s so hard, these days, to cut through the noise and nonsense and get it right. The polymath Powers has done it, with this grand confection of wit, insight and blazing, level-headed honesty. Delicious!”
—Ron Suskind, author of A Hope in the Unseen and The Price of Loyalty

“A disturbing trip down memory lane that places the last four years in true, horrible relief. John Powers takes us into the funhouse – and then shows us a way out.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days and The Colossus of New York

“John Powers’s Sore Winners is an angry but astonishingly good-humored and generous account of the degraded political and media culture of the Bush era. Powers has read everything, watched everything, and come out of his obsession with his sanity and sense of proportion intact. A true populist intellectual, he has a sharp eye for elitism, the cant of the powerful, and the paralyzing dullness of his own side. I can’t imagine a better guide for anyone trying to get his head screwed on right and mount a free-swinging attack on the worst president and the crassest popular culture in recent American history.”
—David Denby, New Yorker film critic and author of American Sucker

“While reading this funny and engaging book, I felt the hair I had torn out reading David Brooks start to grow back.”
—David Rees, author of Get Your War On

“Here’s a uniquely tart, perceptive, penetrating assessment of George W. Bush’s unreal White House. It’s taken more than three years, but American writers are finally gaining the measure of how and why this Administration rules the way it does. John Powers gets it – and his passionate, serious, and at times hilarious book will make you wiser, even as it makes you wince at the state of the Union.”
—Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Director of American Studies, Princeton University


From the Inside Flap

The dollars are green. The terror level is orange. And everybody’s seeing red. Welcome to Bush World.

Rich, scary, and insanely polarized, America is living through one of the wildest eras in its history. In this delicious hybrid of pop mythology and political commentary, John Powers offers an irreverent guided tour of what he dubs “Bush World”—with its terror attacks and obsession with Martha Stewart, its preemptive wars and celebrations of shopping. Sore Winners takes a fresh new look at the multiple personas of the Real Slim Shady, George W. Bush, the gloating Social Darwinism of shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, and the right-wing triumph of Fox News and the ranting “Id Conservatives.” Whether pondering our two greatest white rappers, Eminem and Donald Rumsfeld, or the amazing rise of Gubna Schwarzenegger, the book paints a freewheeling portrait of a society in which racial politics are symbolized by the “Colin and Condi Show,” gay-marriage opponents battle with Queer Eye’s Fab Five, and religious fundamentalism is everywhere—from Mel Gibson’s Passion to America’s bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. As he charts the sometimes comic tale of the left’s attempts to escape from Bush World—Michael Moore and Paul Krugman leading the charge—Powers explores the need for liberals to reclaim virtue from sanctimonious conservatives and take back the political agenda.

Witty and wide-ranging rather than narrowly political, Sore Winners is one of the smartest, most enjoyable books on American culture in years.


About the Author

JOHN POWERS is deputy editor of L.A. Weekly, where he writes a weekly media/culture column called "On." He is also critic-at-large for NPR's Fresh Air, and he has been the film critic for Vogue as well as international correspondent for Gourmet. He lives in Pasadena, CA.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

The Six Faces of George W. Bush

Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, Please stand up
–Eminem

On June 4, 2002, President George W. Bush held a diplomatic summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinean Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas at a palace in Aqaba, a small coastal city best known for the Hollywood-fed myth that it had once been captured by Lawrence of Arabia. After the day's discussions, the leaders strolled together toward the world’s cameras, crossing a bridge built over a swimming pool. It was the kind of culminating image, fat with metaphor–the bridging of divided peoples, the President acting as a uniter–that the Bush White House likes to call “the money shot,” perhaps oblivious of its porn-world associations. The President’s advance team hadn’t just mapped out the leaders’ path, as earlier White House staffs might have done. They had asked the Jordanians to build a bridge over the pool so that Bush and the others could walk over water on their way to the banks of cameras. When the first bridge proved too narrow to accommodate the men side by side, the Bush people had it torn down and a new one built that was wide enough. They were well aware that this visual iconography would matter far more to American TV viewers than anything the President would actually say.

Ever since Parson Weems cooked up the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, our presidents have come robed in mythology, much of it consciously crafted. In the 1920s, the founding father of American advertising, Edward L. Bernays, was asked to help Calvin Coolidge fight the perception that he was icy and remote. Bernays brought Al Jolson and a cohort of his fellow vaudevilleans to breakfast at the White House, an event that prompted the humanizing headline “President Nearly Laughs”–and opened the gate for events staged by media advisors (or pseudo-events, as Daniel Boorstin termed them). Just as advertising has grown more sophisticated in the last eighty years, so has presidential image making. If it was by serendipity that the musical Camelot opened less than one month after John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was his widow Jackie who, in her sole interview after his assassination, planted the idea of America happy-ever-aftering in that fantasy of JFK’s White House.

Spooked by the power of Kennedy’s dashing image, Richard Nixon put himself in the hands of media advisors in 1968, and, as Joe McGinnis famously chronicled in The Selling of the President, they pulled off an extraordinary feat. Tricky Dick was repackaged as The New Nixon, a changed man whose painfully forced smile was something a divided nation could believe in. Small wonder that the Nixon team’s techniques were studied and refined by Ronald Reagan, who invested every manipulated scenario with enormous charisma, and Bill Clinton, who knew all the tricks in The Gipper’s playbook–it wasn’t for nothing that the boy from racy Hot Springs, Arkansas, sold himself as The Man from Hope.

The current White House has scrutinized these precedents and more. No president has controlled his PR more tightly than Bush, who watched aghast as his father lost control of his persona–going from sturdy Cold Warrior to vomiting babbler–and plummeted from 89 percent approval ratings in the summer of 1991 to 37.7 percent of the vote in the 1992 election. Conscious that presidents, like all consumer products, rise and fall on their image, his staff treats each event with the lavish precision of a Michael Mann movie. They’d never let him go on TV wearing a cardigan, as Jimmy Carter did in what’s remembered as his ruinous Malaise Speech. He didn’t actually use the word “malaise,” but such is the power of myth. Bush’s handlers know that they’re courting trouble whenever they put him out there on his own. That’s why he held only eleven solo press conferences in the first three years of his presidency (in the same period, his dad held more than sixty). Like Ben Affleck, who can’t hold the screen all by himself, their man needs to be propped up with crack production design. When he spoke about the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, Adelphia, Dynegy, Rite Aid, and Global Crossing, he stood before a backdrop with the words “Corporate Responsibility” printed again and again as a kind of corroborative wallpaper; when he addressed the nation from Ellis Island on September 11, 2002, an advance team brought in special banks of lights so that the Statue of Liberty would be suitably commanding against the night sky, its pale radiance neatly echoing the blue of the President’s necktie; when he served up a major speech on national security, he was carefully situated before Mount Rushmore, as if auditioning for his spot on the squad. And the White House does this sort of thing almost every day. No less a figure than Michael Deaver, who designed Reagan’s PR blitzes, told The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that the Bush team has taken packaging a president to a startling new level. He called their work “absolutely brilliant,” while conceding that including Bush’s head with the Mount Rushmore quartet may have been going a bit “too far.”*

**The image-building work extends to fiddling with documents that might reflect badly on the president. After Bush’s May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the White House website ran a headline, “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended.." But as TheMemoryHole.com revealed, once the insurrection proved stronger than expected, somebody went back and added the word “Major” before “Combat.”

Predictably, such transparent but skillful shaping of the President’s image horrifies those who think that Bush is a latter-day Wizard of Oz (conveniently forgetting that Clinton did the same thing, albeit less blatantly). They point with glee to ex—Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s remark that, in cabinet meetings, the President was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. They wonder if Bush really calls the shots or whether he’s a hologram created by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. They decry the abyss dividing the way the President is presented and what his administration is actually up to behind closed doors: Did he and Cheney privately joke about that big Halliburton contract in Iraq? Critics want to probe behind the myth and learn exactly who did what and when and why. They want to get “inside” the “real” George Bush.

Why? Much of any presidency’s meaning lies precisely in its constantly changing overlay of imagery, propaganda, rumor, and journalistic blather. To strip them away in search of the “real” president is like trying to find the real onion by peeling away the layers. This is especially true of George W. Bush, who, like John Kennedy four decades before him, has spawned an astonishing number of personas in a remarkably short time, many of them contradictory. Over the last four years we’ve had Bush as Regular Guy, Village Idiot, No-Nonsense CEO, Compassionate Conservative, latter-day Prince Hal, and, of course, Moby Dubya devouring any Democrat foolish enough to stray into his path. None of these myths is without its truth, and each has, at times, served the President’s purposes. What matters here is not so much George Bush the real man as the idea of “George Bush”–the images of the man that America has been peddled over the last four years.

#1: A Regular Guy

During the run-up to the 2002 congressional elections, Bush broke all records for the number of days a president spent campaigning for his party’s candidates. He seemed to be everywhere. Late one night on cable, supporters at a Republican rally explained why they liked him. Their reasons varied, to be sure (“He’s strong,” “He’s a real leader,” etc.), but were united by a common thread: The President was genuine, straightforward, a regular guy. Or as his advisor Karl Rove likes to put it, “He is who he is.”

There’s no denying that this is a potent tautology, identical to the one favored by no less a mensch than Popeye the Sailorman, but it does beg the larger question: Who is he? At first glance, one thing seems clear. He’s not a regular guy. In fact, Bush could almost be the archetype of the un-regular guy, the spoiled rich kid perpetually mocked by our culture from The Magnificent Ambersons’ unbearable Georgie to the high school snots in those 1980s John Hughes comedies. It’s worth recalling that “Junior” Bush comes not merely from privilege but long-standing privilege. On his mother’s side, he’s related both to the British royal family (he’s a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth II) and to President Franklin Pierce; on the Bush side, he’s the grandson of U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, an old-school WASP of the Eastern Establishment, and, of course, the son of George H. W. Bush–Congressman, CIA boss, Nixon frontman at the Republican National Committee, Vice President, and Commander in Chief. Like his father, he attended Andover and Yale and then, for good measure, went to Harvard Business School. But his youth, which lasted until he was almost forty, was not exactly impressive. He was a lazy student (specializing in the Gentleman’s C), a tireless party animal with a DWI arrest in Maine, a lousy businessman, and a superb mama’s boy. Countless Americans of his generation followed a similar youthful path and wound up working for John Deere or standing in the unemployment line. They actually completed their military service, though; Dubya couldn’t be bothered. He ducked the Vietnam War by joining the Texas Air National Guard, jumping the queue to get in, and then, as we all now know, shortchanged his service with impunity: His dad was a congressman. Somehow, he wound up a rich man (estimated worth $9—$26 million) and President of the United States.

One might think such a background would have ordinary people fuming. Yet as Paul Fussell and others have so patiently noted, Americans don’t view class in the strict European way. Individuals are defined less by birth, which they can’t choose, than by personal style, which they can. In many ways, Bush does have the manner of a regular guy–his prodigal youth gives him an aura of rebellion against the hoity-toity ways of the elite. He enjoys sports and remains faithful, we’re told, to his wife. He likes folksy plain talk and dislikes people who put on airs. He doesn’t want to know all that much about current events. Even his onetime drinking troubles help establish his ordinary-guy bona fides: Everyone knows someone who’s had alcohol or drug
problems, and Americans admire those who fall and pick themselves up. A square during the sixties, when he was an Andover cheerleader and the chief Deke at Yale, he bristles at anything that smacks of bohemia or the counterculture. He is overt about his Christian faith, and in a country that’s ever more openly religious (39 percent of Americans claim to be born again), this does make him far more “regular” than most Democratic politicians, or even his own family. Where his father always came off as a faux Texan–“deep doo-doo” is not what littered the trail to the Alamo–Junior feels happiest in Texas, preferring the provincialism of its white oligarchy to the big-city ways back east, where people are uppity about his home state. Doubt his credentials, though, and he’ll instantly remind you that he went to Harvard and Yale. While Bush’s love for Texas is genuine–being “home” matters deeply to him–he’s politician enough to milk its symbolism as a political asset; hence his 1999 purchase of a ranch eight miles from the white-flight suburb of Crawford. Located amid one of the most reactionary enclaves in the nation, this sprawling homestead not only lets him escape the media’s prying eye but affords him chances to be photographed wearing cowboy boots and a belt buckle the size of a hubcap, manfully (and Reaganfully) cutting back brush. How many times in his life do you think he’s done this off-camera?*

*A lot of people work the Texas shtick. Although Molly Ivins went to Smith, got an M.A. from Columbia Journalism School, and was once a bureau chief for The New York Times, her own folksiness makes George W. Bush sound like George Plimpton.

It would be wrong to belabor the image of Bush as a weekend rancher, for that’s only a symptom of his real appeal. In a larger iconic sense, his public persona harks back to a vanishing yet still hardy ideal of white American masculinity, one embodied in today’s movies by Harrison Ford, who, rather like the President, is good at making wisecracks that don’t quite mask the surliness lying beneath. Like a less glamorous Jack Ryan or Indiana Jones, Bush comes across as a terse man of action whose pride is that he says what he means, means what he says, and if you don’t like it, too damn bad. The last president to court such an image was Harry Truman, who spent his final decades puffing up his reputation for straight shooting. Most regular guys can’t afford to adopt such attitude–unlike Dubya, they don’t have the connections to escape its consequences–but the fantasy appeals to them. That’s precisely why Bush has been sold as a self-confident straight-shooter by both his handlers and the conservative journalists who have crafted his myth. “George W. Bush doesn’t give a damn what you think of him,” wrote Tucker Carlson in a much-vaunted Talk profile back in 2000, ignoring all the ways this attitude might be insidious (and dishonest) in a man prepared to soft-pedal his right-wing ideology to momentarily woo swing voters. “That may be why you’ll vote for him for president.”

The Bush team tries to reinforce his virile image by stressing his physicality; perhaps he was a macho cheerleader. We’re told that he runs the mile in less than seven minutes (or did until he injured himself), ending the long national nightmare of Clinton’s jiggly pale thighs. We’re treated to displays like the tail-hook landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln–his abbreviated time in the Air National Guard came in handy, after all–which demonstrated how dashing the President could be in a flight suit. Norman Mailer has suggested that Bush could have made “a world-class male model,” and though this wasn’t meant kindly, the old brawler was onto a truth: The President never seems looser than when he’s doing something purely physical. Bush was far more relaxed in that flight suit than he’d ever been in a business suit, let alone during any of his rare press conferences. In fact, the more you see him doing official business, the more you sense his tension at having to be presidential. It’s there in his peculiar stride across the White House Lawn, elbows out like a clichéd French pedestrian, palms facing apishly backward (an echo of those ears?). It’s there in the slightly clumsy way he whispers to his foreign guests as they stand before the media. It’s there in the narrowed eyes inherited from his father that greet any question he fears might contain a hidden fish hook.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The dollars are green. The terror level is orange. And everybody's seeing red. Welcome to Bush World.

Rich, scary, and insanely polarized, America is living through one of the wildest eras in its history. In this delicious hybrid of pop mythology and political commentary, John Powers offers an irreverent guided tour of what he dubs "Bush World"--with its terror attacks and obsession with Martha Stewart, its preemptive wars and celebrations of shopping. Sore Winners takes a fresh new look at the multiple personas of the Real Slim Shady, George W. Bush, the gloating Social Darwinism of shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, and the right-wing triumph of Fox News and the ranting "Id Conservatives." Whether pondering our two greatest white rappers, Eminem and Donald Rumsfeld, or the amazing rise of Gubna Schwarzenegger, the book paints a freewheeling portrait of a society in which racial politics are symbolized by the "Colin and Condi Show," gay-marriage opponents battle with Queer Eye's Fab Five, and religious fundamentalism is everywhere--from Mel Gibson's Passion to America's bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. As he charts the sometimes comic tale of the left's attempts to escape from Bush World--Michael Moore and Paul Krugman leading the charge--Powers explores the need for liberals to reclaim virtue from sanctimonious conservatives and take back the political agenda.

Witty and wide-ranging rather than narrowly political, Sore Winners is one of the smartest, most enjoyable books on American culture in years.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post

Like many others, John Powers is appalled by Bush and most of those by whom he is surrounded, but unlike most of Bush's critics -- Molly Ivins, Al Franken, Michael Moore et al. -- he takes Bush seriously. He understands that whatever the president's intellectual limitations, he is a representative figure who embodies, at this peculiar and scary moment in our history, aspects of the American state of mind and heart that cannot be dismissed as merely his own idiosyncrasies.

Publishers Weekly

From Bush's infamous "how dare you ask Chirac a question in French" press conference to Colin and Condi as tokenism writ large, L.A. Weekly deputy editor Powers marshals a host of sometimes obvious, media-based critiques in portraying Bush & co. as "sore winners," the products of a populist, social Darwinist culture where doing what you want because you can is OK. Episodic chapters veer in too many directions, incorporating pre-cooked chunks of presidential media history, myriad literary and pop culture allusions (everything from Robert Musil and Preston Sturges to Alice Sebold and Courtney Love) and even Powers's decidedly layman's assessment of what he deems (sore winner) Rumsfeld's lack of planning for postwar Iraq. But Powers's deconstructions of Bush-era political coverage, though too predictable when dealing with the right, have marked range and subtlety when discussing the left's attempts at fighting back. He's best, though, on the sore winner-effect writ large, describing a kind of flip side of the late '90s Bobos in Paradise: a mean-spirited, you-deserve-it mentality that Powers finds in everything from American Splendor to American Idol. Powers can be very funny (as when advocating an "irony enema" for commentator Roger Rosenblatt), but scion Bush as sore winner isn't news, and the book is too thick with kitchen-sink ruminations to work as a whole. Agent, Bonnie Nadell. (On sale Aug. 3) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews