‘Bush seemed to have no idea’

December 12, 2005

I’ll delve into Newsweek’s 4,000-word cover story on my favorite subject — “Bush in the Bubble” — in more detail later, but I wanted to do a separate post on one telling anecdote from the article.

What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether his advisers are quite as frank as they claim to be with the president is also questionable. Take Social Security, for example.

One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was already dead — as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush seemed to have no idea.

“I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the bad news,” says the lawmaker. “This was not a case of him thinking positive. He just didn’t have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he wasn’t briefed at all.” (Bush was not clueless, says an aide, but pushing his historic mission.)

Maybe Bush was trying to remind lawmakers of his interest in his privatization plan. Or perhaps the president was trying to put a positive spin on a bad situation. Or maybe Bush simply wasn’t willing to concede defeat. But for the Republican House member in the room at the time, it sure didn’t sound that way. The president wasn’t optimistic; he was clueless.

Is it at all possible that Bush, who claims not to read newspapers, didn’t know? Are we to believe that the president’s yes-men never bothered to tell him that his Social Security plan had failed miserably? It doesn’t sound too far-fetched considering their track record.

It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States…. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty.

I’m also reminded of a Time interview with a “youngish” White House aide, described as a Bush favorite, who said, “The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me. Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, ‘All right. I understand. Good job.’ He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.”

Is the White House a place in which none of the presidential aides wanted to tell Bush his privatization plan was dead? Sure sounds like it.

Is it at all possible that Bush, who claims not to read newspapers, didn’t know?

I’d bet money on it. Congress pays attention to day to day problems because they’re up again in two years. Bush is clueless and knows Rove tells him.

  • Food for thought.

    Stalin never understood, Service suggests, quite how badly the Soviet state was being managed and how grim life was for ordinary people in the latter stages of his rule. He never traveled, except to and from his various dachas by limousine, and his sycophantic inner circle learned the hard way to avoid giving him any bad news.

    I know the comparison of Bush to Stalin is a faulty one sure to raise the ire of Republicans. While there are many points of convergence between the two there are also points where they diverge. For example,

    Trotsky would never have admitted it, but Stalin became an intellectual in adult life, after his own dogmatic fashion. His essays synthesizing Lenin’s thought were clear and capable, and often more readable than the Bolshevik founder’s tangled prose. (Contrary to what most in the West assumed, Stalin never allowed a ghostwriter to touch his prose.)

  • A personal story, if you will indulge me:

    I’m an architect who once had a client whose first reaction to bad news was always extreme rage and finger-pointing and the most pointed insults, regardless of whether I personally had any responsibility for the news. But as his architect, delivering the bad news fell on my lucky shoulders. Dry heaves indeed. This client truly had a mental defect of some sort, though his bullying tactics certainly helped him succeed in his particular cut-throat business — his success was directly due to his remarkable ability to cut throats. That particular design project represented eighteen of the most miserable months of my life and I will always resent any enjoyment he ultimately took from my brilliant design work.

    Bush could be that guy’s cousin.

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