THE PRESIDENCY Bush inspires a discomforting literary parallel BY CHIP BENSON

Melinda Raab, an associate professor of English at Brown University, is the resident expert on Jane Austen, the English author who in 1811 anonymously wrote the book that would become known as Sense and Sensibility. Although Raab is a very polite, modest, and well-mannered literary scholar, she may come to be regarded as an authority on the dirty business of politics, especially the Bush presidencies (41 & 43). This makes her cringe. How can this be?

Sense and Sensibility is about the contrast within a family of two totally different personality types trying to find a workable ground between passion and reason, between, well, sense and sensibility. The endgame for Austen was marriage, while the Bushes have the fate of the world in their hands. In the novel, the two female protagonists are each tested by a conflict and do something unexpected to ultimately retreat from their extreme early positions. Both eventually reach their goal of a happy marriage.

There’s something of an apt and emerging parallel between Austen’s love story, set in Regency England, and the political epoch of Bush I and Bush II, playing out almost 200 years later in Washington, DC. To my thinking, George Herbert Walker Bush is just like Elinor (Sense), and our current president, George W. Bush, is a dead ringer for Marianne (Sensibility). Just listen to how Professor Raab describes Elinor (Bush 41): "Sensible, restrained, a private moral center, depth is already there." And is there a better example of Marianne’s impulsive sensibility than Bush 43? Again, we summon the English Department: "Responds to display, has a certain innocence, and flings herself into romance, but has to acquire greater depth and caution, will ultimately receive the greatest public humiliation."

According to the presidential scholar Jim Pfiffner of George Mason University, the defining political moment of the Bush I presidency was the principled decision to raise taxes to try to balance the budget. It was an act of real courage because it was political suicide. To go back on the words of Peggy Noonan ("Read My Lips") was perhaps too much sense from a political perspective, but it did set the nation on course for a balanced budget in 1998. It also cost Elinor, er, George H.W. Bush a second term as president.

Bush II (Marianne) has yet to retreat from his bold — some would say impulsive, extreme, and destructive — actions. He is in character, but perhaps without character. He has set out on a course of pure sensibility: the war on terror, tax cuts, and prescription drug benefits. Lee Edwards, a presidential historian at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, notes that Bush II has the advantage of knowing what happened to his father. These political lessons learned will be seen in the forthcoming Republican campaign ads. They may well guarantee two terms for George W, Bush, but at what price to the long-term health of the country? Medicare was a $7 trillion unfunded liability before the $400 billion prescription drug benefit, to say nothing of more tax cuts and increased military spending, and the $500 billion deficit.

It is a cliche to say that reason triumphs over emotion, but as the American public — and the world for that matter — try to figure out George W. Bush, we might hope that his story turns out like the final chapters of Jane Austen’s novel. Finding a closer link between passion and reason may not be at all unlike the compromise necessary for the good of American democracy.