Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, recently broke ranks with his White House buddies and denounced Bush’s leadership. He said he sees a president who only hears what he wants to hear, from those who know not to challenge him with competing ideas. “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in,” Dowd said.
But what about the rest of the White House? It’s one thing for an insecure leader to block out news that might upset him, but surely the president’s team knows not to insulate themselves, right?
Dowd’s assessment is shared by many Republicans in Washington. “Isolation is inevitable in any White House,” says a former Bush aide who returned to the West Wing recently to chat with former colleagues. Now that he is out of the bubble, the former aide says, he can see an isolation he didn’t recognize before. “People in the White House are talking only to each other, reconfirming each other’s and the president’s perceptions and judgments,” he says.
The groupthink is scary — but it’s also helpful in understanding why the Bush White House is so helplessly inept.
The Bush gang believes it’s doing a great job, and they’re convinced that their critics are wrong. Why? Because everyone they know and talk to — i.e., other loyal Bushies who walk the halls of the West Wing — agrees on their greatness.
Last week, we were reminded of this when we learned the president has embraced a “bunker mentality,” and started to feel sorry himself. During a recent meeting with some visitors from Texas, Bush reportedly offered an “extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc.”
One gets the sense that those inside The Bubble can’t imagine why those outside are displeased with the president’s performance.
With that in mind, U.S. News’ Kenneth T. Walsh describes the lame-duck president’s perspective with 20 months to go before giving up his office.
President Bush’s admiration for Abraham Lincoln knows no bounds. In a recent meeting at the White House, Bush told visitors how Lincoln (whose portrait he has installed in the Oval Office) persevered in the Civil War despite many defeats on the battlefield, tens of thousands of casualties, and doubts among Northern voters that the conflict could ever be won. As the campaign of 1864 approached, Bush related, Lincoln admitted privately that he didn’t think he would be re-elected, but pursued his policies anyway. Bush also described how Lincoln pressed on despite his grief when his beloved 11-year-old son Willie died in February 1862. The visitors came away with the conviction that Bush sees himself in Lincoln’s mold more deeply than ever.
To Bush’s critics, the incident is unsettling. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, noting that the president has also compared himself to Harry Truman, told U.S. News: “This is delusional-comparing the equivalent of Warren Harding to two of our greatest presidents!” Adds presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power: “He may come across to some people as a man of principle, but a great majority see him as stubborn and unyielding. … And everything he touches turns to dust.” […]
“We’re seeing the very early demise of an administration,” says a former White House adviser to Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, with considerable sadness. “It usually happens six months before a president leaves office in a second term, but in this case it’s happening now.”
In theory, the Bush gang has time to make use of their last 20 months in office, but to set a direction, they’d have to get some sense of perspective and priorities. To do that, they’d have to step outside The Bubble.
And that doesn’t appear likely.