It may not be the kind of development that’ll shake up the campaign (though I wish it were), but I couldn’t help but notice that the more Bush has spoken about national security lately, the more he commits distracting mistakes that he regrets.
I’m not talking about amusing Bushisms in which the president gets confused about grammar, word pronunciation, and subject-verb agreement (though there are plenty of those); I mean gaffes in which Bush delivers an off-message remark that requires a tortured explanation and, in turn, offers Dems another area of criticism. We can only hope this continues.
Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan noticed yesterday that this is a real problem for the president. Sullivan, for example, is worried that Bush is too confused for our own good.
“[E]very time I hear the president talk extemporaneously about the war — his interview with Tim Russert last February was a classic — he does seem to have almost no conceptual grasp of what he’s talking about. Back then, he seemed flummoxed by the very concept of a distinction between a war of choice and a war of necessity. Now he seems to be parroting a Council on Foreign Relations confab on the permanence of terrorism….
[T]here are times when you have to wonder whether he really understands this issue as deeply as he needs to; and whether that limited grasp has led to some of the calamitous ‘miscalculations’ that even he has now acknowledged.”
It prompted Drum to add that the president’s limited intellect is a significant burden.
“[E]ven though FDR might not have been a policy wonk, he could hold a press conference and make it clear that he understood what he was doing. But with Bush, every time you get past the high school version of his policies, he’s just adrift. He’s generally shrewd enough to change the subject when he realizes he’s at sea, but when he does answer it’s scary.
Like I said, I don’t think we need Albert Einstein in the Oval Office. But do Republicans really feel comfortable with a guy who so plainly doesn’t understand his own policies? Don’t they think this might have something to do with the fact that so much of what he’s done has turned out badly even from a conservative perspective? When is enough enough?”
Considering the past few days, it’s hard to argue with these observations. Three telling examples that come to mind.
First, there was the “miscalculation” admission.
President Bush acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that he had miscalculated post-war conditions in Iraq, The New York Times reported.
The paper quoted Bush as saying during a 30-minute interview that he made “a miscalculation of what the conditions would be” in post-war Iraq.
This was no minor concession. It was the first time the president had ever acknowledged, in public, that he made a tragic mistake on the biggest challenge of his presidency.
The admission of a mistake didn’t generate massive media attention — not like, say, Kerry calling for a “sensitive” approach to foreign policy — but it seems to be part of a trend.
After “miscalculation” came the bizarre “catastrophic success” line.
Bush…acknowledged in the interview that the administration did not anticipate the nature of the resistance in Iraq, and he said that was his greatest mistake in office. “Had we had to do it over again,” he said, “we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day.”
In other words, Bush is blaming the troops for his failure. Our military is so strong and powerful, it caused the president to screw up post-war planning. Darn that efficient fighting force!
And, of course, 24 hours later, Bush said he doesn’t believe we can win a war on terror.
Three days, three bizarre comments about national security.
In each instance, Bush was speaking extemporaneously, without a prepared text written by someone else, and in each instance, the White House has had to scramble to explain the meaning of the president’s remarks. Hardly the mark of a leader who inspires confidence.
There are only two months left before the election, but that still leaves plenty of time for Bush to say what he means, mean what he says, and confuse the heck out of anyone who happens to hear him.