Follow the Leader
This weekend, some prominent politicians are finally starting to make a point that’s been obvious since the first days of the Bush presidential campaign: that is, the gaping hole at the center - a negative presence that everyone talks themselves into believing is really filled by a strong leader. Bush’s supporters make a virtue of his obvious intellectual limitations, claiming that because he doesn’t claim to know everything himself, he surrounds himself with a first class crew of experts: experienced insiders like Cheney and Rumsfeld, strategists like Rice and Wolfowitz, respected figures like Powell, etc. The President presides over this council of great minds like a CEO, laying out the overall vision, making decisions, and not getting bogged down in minutiae like his too-clever-by-half predecessor. The result is pure 200-proof leadership, enforced by rigid discipline and loyalty.
Indeed.
Bush himself, for reasons that are clear every time he opens his mouth, rarely gives deep insights into his policy-making process. His state addresses are full of platitudes and generalities, leaps of logic and unsupported assertions that cannot be taken seriously except as political propaganda. He never speaks without a script, never takes spontaneous questions, never engages in a dialogue with actual citizens who are not invited guests to his canned events.
With this silence at the top, the personality of the Administration takes on the qualities of whoever is speaking for it at a given time: methodically technocratic (Rice), full of swagger (Rumsfeld), calm and in control (Powell), fanatically ideological (Ashcroft) or coolly, pathologically professional (Cheney). Initially, it seemed as though each of these spokespeople was charged with carrying a particular aspect of the President’s mood – as if each were a mask he would don to give a specific kind of message to a different audience. This in itself was disconcerting, especially considering how little of Bush’s true persona is ever revealed to the public. But lately, it’s taken on a schizophrenic quality with the increasing disharmony evident in the divergent voices.
Disagreement between the major figures in an Administration is to be expected. Almost every President since Roosevelt solicited a diverse range of opinions from his advisors in an effort to foster “creative chaos” and consolidate his own leadership. And therein lies the difference.
When Kissinger spoke for Nixon, or Baker for Papa Bush, or Rubin for Clinton – no matter how independent and outspoken these policy-makers were, there was never the slightest doubt who was ultimately running the show. But is it possible to picture George W. Bush sitting down and giving Dick Cheney his marching orders? How seriously do you think Donald Rumsfeld, who was Secretary of Defense when W. was still thinking up ways to sneak out of his National Guard unit, takes his Commander in Chief? Do you think Condi Rice ever worries that Bush will reflect seriously on the advice she gives him and challenge the logic of her strategic doctrines? Can you imagine Colin Powell sitting in on a diplomatic engagement between George Bush and another foreign leader without a twinge of embarrassment and perhaps contempt?
Bush’s supporters point to his “leadership” as his defining quality. Let’s look at leadership. Harry Truman fired Douglas McArthur, America’s pre-eminent military figure, at the height of the Korean War for insubordination and imposed the Taft-Hartley Act on striking unions. Nixon went to China in contravention of an entire career of anti-Communism, shocking his hardcore base. Reagan reversed himself and raised taxes in 1986 when it was clear that the 1981 cuts were having too much of a negative effect on public finances. Papa Bush did the same in 1990, even though it meant electoral defeat. Clinton, the first Democrat elected President in 12 years, declared the era of big government over, passed welfare reform and balanced the budget.
By contrast, George W. Bush has never, in nearly three years in office, taken a single significant position against the wishes of his base. He has never challenged his supporters to move with him to a more moderate stance. He has never publicly rebuked one of his senior aides (the firing of the first Treasury secretary, a nonentity taken seriously by no one, barely registers). He has never moved with sincerity and purpose to common ground with his opponents or shown the least bit of grace and humility in his interactions with anyone.
For Bush, leadership consists solely of following the course dictated by ideology, never taking dissenting views seriously, and never showing respect for his opponents. It is the leadership of the fraternity president and the schoolyard bully, not a responsible statesman. His inflexibility and lack of expertise gives his subordinates an unprecedented field of play to impose their own agendas and policies in his name. When these agendas start to diverge, there’s nothing at the center holding them together. Bush’s understanding of his own philosophy is not sufficiently deep to reconcile the contradictions that emerge from the overlapping ambitions of his minions, and he is so reliant upon their expertise (or their connections) that he is constrained from making dramatic changes to the cast of characters as a way of imposing his own views.
I think it is dawning on Bush, or at least on some of his personal advisors like Karl Rove, how this is beginning to have serious policy consequences – and therefore political consequences. He gave the Heritage Foundation their tax cuts, he gave the neocons their war, he gave the religious right a host of little victories (and is waiting on the big one: the Supreme Court), and he gave his corporate backers bags of loot and no-bid contracts. He got to score easy points against targets no one really likes: Saddam, the UN, the French. And he got to bask in the glow of a tragedy that would have made anyone in a leadership role seem strong and decisive.
It’s easy to say yes to all your friends and no to all your enemies, or to cry a tear and strike a tough pose in the face of disaster, but it’s not leadership. Leadership is about making the hard decisions. And those are about the only decisions Bush has left. What kind of a leader is George Bush really? I think we will all find out in the next 14 months.
9:27:05 PM 
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