Get out your empathy. I want to ask you to put it through its paces. In fact, the task facing us may push your empathy beyond all previous limits:

Please try to imagine what it’s REALLY like to be George W. Bush.

I don’t mean the cartoon Bush, or the TV satire Bush, not even the spun and staged Bush his handlers let us see. I mean try to imagine what his hour to hour, minute to minute life is like. Come on now, put yourself in those scuffed Yale loafers, wintering in Midland, summering in Kennebunkport, a few jiving weekends with the National Guard, a nice SMU sorority gal wife, some kind of mom, daddy just oozing his way right to the top, a few failed oiled ventures, some big baseball bucks finally thanks to daddy’s friends, who also glad-hand right into the governor’s mansion, from which it’s only a hop, skip, and a coup to the biggest job of all.

Probably not that nice, huh, in spite of all that money, all that privilege, don’t you think?

Hold on. I’m not here to build sympathy for Dubya. If you’re going to suffer, it’s probably a whole lot better to suffer rich than to suffer poor.

The point is this: Beneath all that spun and satirized surface there is a person, and in this age of media manipulation we know very little about Dubya’s (excuse the jargon) core personality.

This rather halting column comes out of repeated and persisting glimpses that one thinks to catch of (don’t laugh) the real Dubya. Or at least, glimpses of a Dubya who is a whole lot realer than many people think.

What I think I’ve seen in those brief glimpses is enormous fear, insecurity, an unexamined awareness that he is way, way over his head.

These are only tiny, very brief glimpses, mostly because his very shrewd handlers never let us see Dubya in an unscripted situation.

The only times we’ve seen him at some unscripted length was in the campaign debates. Especially in the St. Louis debate, under the unrelenting eye of the live cameras, Dubya looked—again, fleetingly—like he was scared shitless, and that maybe at some nearly conscious level he knew he was almost completely unqualified for the job he was trying to get. As Molly Ivins put it: he looked like a frightened deer caught in the headlights of a speeding car.

But, you say, even if this is true, what does it matter? The guy got the job. He’s surrounded by mostly very smart, very capable people.

It matters because, for all his handling, he does occupy a powerful office. If his present, carefully planned words and actions don’t matter much, it is possible that, if the personal reality of being Dubya is as fragile and fearful as those glimpses indicate, at some point, in a time of personal or public crisis, we could see a completely unpredictable eruption of words and actions from Dubya that matter very much indeed.

We appear to have voted (and of course not-voted) our way into a real-life version of Jerzy Kosinski’s Holy Fool conceit. Dubya is Chauncey Gardiner with money. Except that Chauncey, the White House Gardener in Kosinski’s novel, Being There, remains always innocent even after chance turns him and his folksy unassuming pronouncements into a media darling, and the D.C. courtiers gasp in wonder at the profundity of Chauncey’s simpleton commentary on the passing scene.

There is something of Chauncey’s naïve confidence in Dubya (and that may be a big part of his appeal to semi-educated voters). With Chauncey, it’s a matter of utter simplicity, true fool-doom. With Dubya, we’re dealing with someone who no doubt accepts unquestioningly the rightness of his privileged life and the firm political beliefs of those who share that life.

An especially attractive sub-quality, springing from that self-assuredness, is the deep belief among the privileged that though problems, even tragedies, may occur, they, the privileged, will recover, survive, and thrive tomorrow, as they have done throughout history. Thus a part of Dubya’s version of fool-dom is his exuding of this wholly false but also wholly convincing assurance.

And, remember, in the tightly closed circle of privilege, these things are so obvious they don’t even warrant talking about. So sea level rises a little, or even a lot. The summer cottages at Newport (and Kennebunkport) are many feet above sea level. So millions are dying of AIDS in Africa and Asia. The poor we shall always have with us.