When Wishing It Makes It So
Joe Klein has a fabulous piece in this week's Time online edition that makes an interesting case about Bush's peculiar leadership style. The crux of his point is this:
I am not saying Bush is a liar. Lying is witting: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." This is weirder than that. The President seems to believe that wishing will make it so — and he is so stupendously incurious that he rarely makes an effort to find the truth of the matter. He misleads not only the nation but himself.
Since the early days of the 2000 campaign, Bush's defenders have poo-pooed criticisms about his apparent lack of intellectual firepower. "You don't have to be smart to be President," they insisted, "You just have to have smart people around you to give advice."
The problem is that Bush does not simply lack command of the facts. He seems to lack the basic habits of mind to separate facts from beliefs. At some gut level, he may think he knows who to trust, and his temprament allows him to act on his instincts without spending much time analyzing confusing data. When the situation is straightforward, this is a strength. However, when information does not conform to his simple moral schematic, he is clearly prone to ignore any evidence that conflicts with his preconceived opinions.
Certainly this temprament is not unique to Bush. Most people practice self-delusion to a greater or lesser extent as a basic psychological survival mechanism. But Bush's contempt for analysis seems exceptionally profound, and his evident impatience with debate no doubt intimidates even thoughful subordinates from raising troubling contradictions - no matter how important they may be to a proper understanding of the issue at hand.
The result is a kind of ideological echo chamber in which the President is insulated from any sort of complexity, which reinforces his opinion that everything really is as simple as he believes it is. Since his lieutenants manage to keep such rigid discipline within the Executive branch and Congress, he does not have to worry about criticism from within his own party and can dismiss everything else as petty partisanship.
The problem with this simple and single-minded devotion to ideology is that it leaves the country ill-equipped to react properly when confronted with events that do not conform to the ideological paradigm. Bush's leadership style excels at front-running, but is uncommonly brittle when faced with genuine adversity. In the end, the facts will catch up to the rhetoric, and when they do, no amount of wishful thinking or raw partisan propaganda will be able to conceal the shortcomings of a leader who cannot distinguish between truth and fantasy.
9:25:12 AM 
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