If you have time, I’d really encourage readers to watch the video of yesterday’s press conference with Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A link to the video is on the White House transcript.
The president doesn’t hold many press conferences, so it’s sometimes easy to forget just how difficult it is for him to answer questions about, well, just about anything. After Bush offered an incoherent response to a question about America’s influence in the Middle East, Josh Marshall said:
We know the president isn’t very articulate in news conference settings. But national leaders don’t have to be articulate to be good leaders. In fact there have been a number very good ones who could scarcely speak coherently for thirty seconds.
But if you watch this passage I think you see something different. Namely, that pretty much everything that’s happened over the last three years, and certainly over the last three months has just gone in one presidential ear and out the other. He is, in both the deepest and most superficial sense, out of it.
Truer words were never spoken. There were a total of six questions at the press conference, each of which prompted long, meandering answers from the president, and none of which made a lot of sense.
I’m reminded of a recent column from Jonathan Chait.
Way back when he first appeared on the national scene, the rap against George W. Bush was that he might be too dumb to be president. As time passed, questions about Bush’s mental capabilities faded away.
After 9/11, his instinctive rather than analytical view of the world seemed to be just what we needed, and Americans of all stripes were desperate to see heroic qualities in him. (As Dan Rather announced at the time: “George Bush is the president; he makes the decisions; and, you know, as just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”)
On top of that, Democrats decided it was politically counterproductive to attack Bush’s intelligence. Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council said in 2002, for instance, that calling Bush dumb “plays directly into Bush’s strength, which is that he comes across as a regular guy.” And so, for most of the last six years, the question of Bush’s intelligence has remained off the table.
Oh, sure, a few of us have brought it up from time to time, but we have generally been dismissed out of hand as wacky Bush-haters. By 2004, the question had been turned around completely. Democrats had almost nothing to say about Bush’s lack of intellect, while Republicans joyfully and repeatedly attacked John Kerry as an egghead. Anti-intellectualism was triumphant.
Yet it is now increasingly clear that Bush’s status as non-rocket scientist is a serious problem.
Indeed, it is. I’m not concerned with the president’s grammar or frequent inability to compete a sentence; I’m concerned that Bush has a couple of simple talking points — freedom is on the march, violence is proof of progress — and he’s simply incapable of adding any additional insights. The Bush we saw in 2000, avoid details and spurning specifics, is the same man we see today.
Chait asked, “Is Bush Still Too Dumb to Be President?” I’m afraid the answer is painfully obvious.