The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America - Rilegato

All public policy should revolve around the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do.

George W. Bush, 1994
When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 he was presented to the nation by his campaign handlers and a sympathetic media as a nice- enough fellow who didnít take himself or much of anything else save perhaps his family and religion too seriously. Though polls consistently showed that a majority of voters held views closer to those of Democratic candidate Al Gore and, indeed, a 52 percent majority did end up voting for Al Gore or Ralph Nader even most of Bushís opponents did not see his presidency as much of a threat to their beliefs.

While Bush had the reputation of being a conservative from a conservative state, he did not strike voters as particularly ideologically motivated. The media served his purposes here by focusing not on his record in Texas, or on the scale of the tax cut he proposed, but on his personal story of youthful dissolution before finding faith, along with his apparently charming habit of handing out nicknames to everyone he met. George W. Bush, the self-described compassionate conservative, was said to be different from the Republican hard-liners in Congress, who, in President Bill Clintonís terms, held up the nationís business with a politically inspired shutdown of the government and impeachment of the president. True, few people found themselves awed by Bushís intellect, but the argument went that a man who knew himself, as Bush appeared to, was preferable to one who knew many things but needed to rely on pollsters to tell him what to say.

Nothing about Bushís genial campaign or Al Goreís, for that matter motivated Democrats to commit themselves strongly to his defeat. The New York Times reported just before Election Day that the gap in intensity between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year, with Republicans fighting tooth and nail for their man, and Democrats taking a more diffident attitude to theirs. Polls showed that Gore voters by two-to-one were more willing to accept a Bush victory after the Florida fiasco than vice versa. The retiring Democratic senator and liberal icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan told the Times, There is no great ideological chasm dividing the candidates. . . . Each one has his prescription-drugs plan, each one has his tax-cut program, and the country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other.

Bushís victory in the highly disputed fight in Florida and his failure to get more votes than Gore nationally further contributed to the belief that Americaís forty-third president would govern from the happy middle of the partisan divide. Given the circumstances, he wrote the commentator Joe Klein in the liberal New Yorker magazine, there is only one possible governing strategy: a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship.

Few predictions in recent political history have proved quite so mistaken. Once sworn into office, a potential bait-and-switch occurred as George W. Bush proceeded to embark on the most radical presidency in modern times. In fact, his hard-right agenda strikes out in so many directions simultaneously that itís nearly impossible for the average citizen to keep up. In his first term as president, Bush has sought to explode precedents in almost every area of governance, whether the policy in question be foreign or domestic, popular or unpopular, old or new, effective or not. He has done so in contempt of the opinions of not only his opponents but also many of the corps of professional experts who are charged with nonpartisan evaluation of government programs purely from a standpoint of efficacy. To find an apt parallel in American history one would have to go all the way back to FDRís New Deal and wartime mobilizations. But Roosevelt was contending with the Great Depression and the near-collapse of world capitalism, and later with the declaration of war against the United States by two highly industrialized great powers bent on world domination, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Bush, in contrast, is driven almost exclusively by a near-religious belief in the rectitude of his ideological convictions on domestic matters and by the shock of a single albeit devastating terrorist attack by a group of stateless, pre-modern Arab fundamentalists. There is literally no comparison.

To be fair to the pontificating pundits, it was not easy at least at first to discern just how differently from his campaign rhetoric Bush intended to govern. There were few precedents for Bushís transformation, either in Americaís political past or in Bushís own personal history. I remember describing Bush as an incrementalist when he was down here, and he was, said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas. He was not throwing the long pass. He was not a policy ideologue by any stretch of the imagination. Early profiles of Bush paid tribute to his quiet sense of religious commitment and his easygoing aw-shucks manner. Timeís Jay Carney discerned in Bush an immutable core and called the president a man of preternatural equanimity. Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote, Mr. Bushís is the impish grin, a deliberate signal of confidence and good cheer. He revels in unpretentiousness, and he seems wholly undaunted by his new responsibilities.í When Bush came to Washington, USA Today announced in a bold front-page headline, Bush charm offensive gains ground. Here was a classic case of the media as an enabler, encouraging the elevation of style over substance.

While it is important not to misunderestimate George W. Bush personally, we think him dumb like a fox it is no less important to address the consequences of his self-defined limits of intellectual inquiry. I was never a great intellectual, he said in 1986. Weíre [the Bush family] not serious, studious readers. We are readers for fun. In 1999 Bush explained to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that he didnít like to read long books, especially books about policy. His advisors have admitted that the staff usually limits him to three or four thirty- to forty-five-minute policy time sessions per week, about what Bill Clinton engaged in per day. Then, more often than not, the president sloughs off responsibility with the admonishment, You guys decide it. It was therefore hardly surprising when our forty-third president told Fox News in the fall of 2003 that he rarely read beyond the headlines of the dayís newspapers. Even Bush friends and boosters cannot vouch for the extent of his knowledge. Neoconservative strategist Richard Perle damned with faint praise when he told Vanity Fair, The first time I met Bush 43, I knew he was different. . . . One, he didnít know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didnít know very much.

It was dismaying though obviously not disqualifying that president-elect George W. Bush entered office with less understanding of American history and the world than probably any twentieth-century predecessor. But lacking Eisenhowerís or his own fatherís worldliness or JFKís or Clintonís intellect, Bush is prone to grab onto a useful intellectual framework like a life preserver and then not let go whether itís Myron Magnetís sour interpretation of the sixties in The Dream and the Nightmare, Marvin Olaskyís irrationally exuberant view of the value of government faith-based programs in The Tragedy of American Compassion, or Paul Wolfowitzís Pollyannaish analysis of the likely consequences of an American invasion of Iraq.

Bushís lack of the most rudimentary knowledge of the areas in which he sought to pursue radical change did not strike him or his advisors as in any way limiting. The president is rarely allowed by his handlers to speak directly to the media on matters of policy, and he has reduced the number of regular presidential press conferences held on average by his four predecessors in office by nearly three-quarters. (By the fall of his third year, the father Bush had held sixty-one press conferences; his son by the same time, nine.) They happen often enough to indicate that Bush does not take presidential preparation much more seriously than he took his course-work as an affirmative- action legacy student at Yale. Asked for instance, in July 2003, whether he might revisit the case of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, Bush replied, Well, I said very clearly at the press conference with Prime Minister [Mahmoud] Abbas, I donít expect anybody to release somebody from prison whoíll go kill somebody. Clearly Bush had never even heard of Pollard, who is only the most famous foreign spy to be captured and tried in the United States in the past thirty years and whose jail sentence remains a significant bone of contention in U.S.-Israeli relations. One could literally fill books with examples of cases where Bush demonstrated less knowledge about a given topic than would a decently educated graduate student.

Bushís combination of a low base of knowledge coupled with his admitted lack of intellectual curiosity might be less worrisome in a less ambitious politician. No president can know everything and, as Bush defenders argued during the election, many presidents have been book smart and real-world stupid and vice versa. But the advent of the second Bush administration witnessed a fully united Republican Party driven by the engines of the religious right, big business and the neoconservative worldview and piloted by a famously stubborn Texan.

For example, Bushís unwillingness to depart from an original premise get Saddam; tax cuts are always good reflects a focus and willpower that are much commented-on traits. We donít second-guess out of the White House. We donít adjust the plan based on editorials, he said with an edge of disdain during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. A supporter told the Washington Post that Bush learned that anguishing doesnít pay. He doesnít let his own inner core be supplanted by the hand-wringing of policy wonks. Post reporter David von Drehle concluded, Bus...