Why Bush Keeps Failing

Having ideas isn't enough. Examining ideas to see if they make any sense and then, if they do make sense, finding a way to implement them is how a lot of government works. Bush never got the picture. Clinging to his unique, cock-eyed view of the world has done enormous damage to the United States. Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly puts it well:

...all presidents rely for their decisions on a complex stew of ideology, interest group pandering, and political calculation. So what is it that makes Bush so different? Just this: until Bush they also all cared about serious policy analysis. This was obviously more striking in some (Clinton) than in others (Reagan), but they all paid attention to it and it informed their actions.

But not Bush. He's subject to the same stew of competing interests and factions as any other president, but what truly makes him unique is what's missing: a respect for policy analysis. After eight months of working in the Bush White House, John DiIulio reported that "the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking." Paul O'Neill described Bush in cabinet meetings as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." A senior White House official told Ron Suskind that the Bush White House is "just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing." The meltdown at FEMA, the war with the CIA for being insufficiently hawkish, the lack of a serious plan for Social Security privatization, the staffing of postwar Iraq with inexperienced ideologues — all of these things have the same root cause: a belief that ideas are all that matter.

Of course, that also means that President Bush's initiatives fail at a truly spectacular rate. After all, policy is all about figuring out how to implement ideas so that they actually work...

Having ideas is useless unless there is problem or issue that the ideas address. A president has to understand the problem he is addressing beyond talk show posturing. And just because a president has an idea doesn't mean he has the facts that will enable him to assess if his idea can work. He has to dig for the facts and look them square in the face. And if a president refuses to even look at facts that contradict his notions, the problems are further compounded.

Of course, with Bush, there is the added issue that he will bend the rules and take shortcuts in the belief he can still, somehow, implement his ideas. As has been said elsewhere, Bush just manages to dig a deeper hole for himself and our nation. If George W. Bush were not the son of a former president, it is doubtful, given his record before he became governor of Texas, that he would ever have gotten as far as he has.

The Republicans will be spending the next decade explaining how they let Bush get so far and why they never held him in check.