Newsweek’s Howard Fineman recently caught Bill Clinton at the National Governors Conference recently and was struck by just how impressive the former president is discussing, well, anything.
In this instance, Clinton delivered an “hour-long, impromptu aria on the health-care crisis facing the country,” with an emphasis on childhood nutrition and obesity. Fineman marveled at Clinton’s ability to “mesmerize a ballroom full” of governors with a detailed speech in which he “effortlessly wove the disparate strands — from insurance-industry profits to the chemistry of fat digestion to the history of the Department of Agriculture crop programs — into a comprehensible whole.”
And then Fineman notes the inability of Clinton’s successor to communicate even half as well.
Clinton’s performance reminded me of the leadership strengths — and weaknesses — of his Baby Boomer successor. George W. Bush is in choppy water over the Dubai ports issue. And he is so, in large part, because, unlike Clinton, he is a man of bullet points, not explanations; of slogans, not systems; of certitude, not complexity.
I’ve known Bush for a long time and I know that he distrusts talk, at least public talk. He’d rather make a decision — give an order — and then go out and attack a felled tree with a chain saw. He is confident to the point of arrogance when he makes a “tough call.” But he objects by nature to the demand that he explain his reasoning and/or the process behind it.
Why he is this way, I don’t quite know.
Fineman seems genuinely confused about the reason Bush is unwilling to explain his beliefs or agenda. I don’t think it’s all that complicated.
Perhaps, Fineman speculates, it’s due to a “sense of entitlement.” Or maybe Bush saw his father’s explanations do little good, so he decided it’s not worth the trouble. Or maybe, Fineman said, it’s because Bush is “unsure of himself” without a simple script.
All of these are reasonable possibilities, but Fineman seems to dance around the one explanation for why Bush “distrusts talk”: because the president is really bad at it.
It’s speculation, of course, but I suspect that if Bush were capable of speaking eloquently and intelligently on matters of national significance, he would. Bush isn’t holding back because he doesn’t think he should have to defend his decisions; he’s holding back because he doesn’t have anything of substance to add.
I realize why Fineman avoided mentioning this — there’s little professional upside to questioning the president’s intelligence in Newsweek — but it does seem like the most logical explanation, given what we’ve seen over the last six years.