It was a moment that would come to haunt his presidency. The Daily Show promptly ran an animated parody portraying Bush as a superhero known as “The Decider,” and this was soon followed by another episode called “The Decider—The Origin.” (“How did he become the Decider? Has he always been the Decider?”) The Huffington Post set Bush’s quote to the tune of “I Am the Walrus,” by the Beatles, and the phrase “the decider” soon became nearly ubiquitous in the media. (It was the focus of at least three stories in the New York Times in 2006 and was mentioned many times more than that.) Today, entering “the decider” into Google returns more than a million results, ranging from references to one of Bill Maher’s comedy specials to a Time magazine cover story on Anthony Kennedy (“From Gay Marriage to Obamacare, Justice Anthony Kennedy Is the Decider”) to a comparison of the wide receivers Sammy Watkins and Mike Evans. What is remarkable is how much of this can be traced directly to Bush’s comment. Between January 1, 1851, and April 17, 2006—that is, over a period of 155 years—the New York Times used the expression “the decider” only nine times, which works out to roughly once every seventeen years. In the eight years since Bush’s press conference, however, it has appeared in the paper 493 times. That’s five times a month.

What is going on here? Several things, I suspect. The locution “the decider” sounds odd—as one retired linguistics professor notes in an amusingly annoyed blog commentary, “No normal person would ever utter such a thing.” But peculiarity can’t entirely explain our response—for one thing, President Bush said many things far quirkier. (For sheer strangeness, it would be hard to top “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”) More important, I think, is that something about “the decider” seems childish, or rather childlike. “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”: This seems to capture the hunger for control that is characteristic of all humans but that is completely unmasked in three-year-olds. Control means getting to decide when bedtime will be, or which shoes will be worn, or whether lollipops will be forthcoming. Control, to a three-year-old, means owning the choice. And this seems amusing because as adults we realize, albeit unconsciously, exactly how doubtful that ownership must always be, and how delicate a contrivance lies at the center of our sense of possession.

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