ESR's Sixth Annual Person of the Year

By Steven Martinovich
web posted December 24, 2001

New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani. Barbara Olson. Todd
Beamer and Linda Gronlund of United Flight 93. Those and
many others are the people that you nominated as your Person
of the Year. As worthy as they are, 56 per cent of you believe
that only person deserves to the nod.

Finally we have a leader! Need I say more?

How could this selection go to anyone else this year?

- comments from two nominators

It's almost a cliché given how often people say the words, but it
is true, you can only judge the true measure of a person by how
they respond in a crisis.

In January 2001, I doubt many people - Republicans included -
would have been very confident about George W. Bush's ability
to govern. Millions of Americans refused to concede the
legitimacy of his Administration despite his early successes
dealing with Congress and America's problems. It was really
only by the summer of this year that Americans truly began to
accept Bush for the man they hoped he was. After eight years of
scandal and prevarication, a man sat in the Oval Office who was
plain spoken, did what he promised and lived his life the way
many Americans do.

The world changed on September 11 and with it, different
standards were established for a president. Not since John F.
Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis and Franklin D. Roosevelt's
response to the attack at Pearl Harbor was a president placed in
the position that Bush was in. A morning that began for him in a
Florida grade school classroom ended with a desperate need to
unite the American people into a common purpose.

Contrary to what many pundits wrote this year, September 11
didn't change George W. Bush and nor did he mature in office.
The former party boy who admitted he had been alcoholic and
dogged by rumors of 1970s drug use, Bush confronted his
demons a long time ago and made himself into the man he is long
before Osama bin Laden hatched a plot to murder as many
people as possible in attacks using airliners. Many observers saw
in Bush a peace of mind that comes from people whom, to use
the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, achieve serenity by
accepting the things that they can't change.

It was that peace of mind mixed with a determination for justice
that has, at least in this journal's opinion, powered Bush since
those attacks. It was on display the night that Bush climbed atop
a pile of rubble at the site of the World Trade Center three days
after the attack and truly became America's president. As he
stood and spoke on that pile of rubble in Manhattan, some
people in the crowd shouted they couldn't hear him.
 
"I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people
who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,"
Bush answered. With the crowd responding with a chant of
"USA, USA," it would have been impossible to believe that
George W. Bush was anything less America's leader, something
that many would have argued not nine months before.

It's early yet in Bush's presidency considering that early January
marks only his first year in office, so it's hard to predict what
kind of presidency Americans can expect over the coming years.
Doubtless, he will make moves that conservatives won't like. A
Congress determined to limit his impact as much as possible
before 2004 may blunt his agenda. He may falter and make a
serious mistake. An American public may forget the feelings they
had when they saw their president surrounded by their heroes
chanting their nation's name.

Despite that, in the words of the nominator quoted at the
beginning of this citation, how could this selection go to anyone
else this year?

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