The Book on Bush

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Chapter One

The Power of Audacity

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 didn't 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 Bush's 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 Clinton's terms, held up the nation's business with a politically inspired shutdown of the government and impeachment of the president. True, few people found themselves awed by Bush's 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 Bush's genial campaign or Al Gore's, 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.

Bush's victory in the highly disputed fight in Florida and his failure to get more votes than Gore nationally further contributed to the belief that America's 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 it's 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 FDR's 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 Bush's transformation, either in America's political past or in Bush's 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. Time's 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. Bush's 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.' 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. We're [the Bush family] not serious, studious readers. We are readers for fun. In 1999 Bush explained to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that he didn't 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 day's 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 didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't 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 Eisenhower's or his own father's worldliness or JFK's or Clinton's intellect, Bush is prone to grab onto a useful intellectual framework like a life preserver and then not let go whether it's Myron Magnet's sour interpretation of the sixties in The Dream and the Nightmare, Marvin Olasky's irrationally exuberant view of the value of government faith-based programs in The...