Ron Suskind’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine is obviously the talk of the blogosphere, and with good reason. While there have been many excellent looks at Bush’s religious faith, Suskind examined an entirely different — and for Bush, more important — kind of faith: this White House’s faith in itself.
On the surface, this might sound like a good thing. People should believe in themselves and the merit of their efforts. Leaders shouldn’t get bogged down with responding to partisan critics’ petty attacks; they should move forward on principle. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with placing trust in those around you. In fact, a lot of Bush aides probably believe this is exactly what’s happening in this White House and there’s nothing scary about it.
But Suskind highlights exactly why this kind of insular, intuition-based style is not only ineffective, but literally frightening. It’s about faith, but it has nothing to do with religion. This was a story that explains the president’s faith in the inerrant wisdom of his own hunches.
The [senior Bush advisor] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: “Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, “Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.”
Debate is wrong. “Reality” and “judicious study” are principles to be dismissed. Bush and his aides are “creat[ing]” their “own reality” — and they’re quite proud of themselves.
And why not? Once you’ve lost touch with reality and you’ve decided facts are inconvenient constructs you can make up as you go along, reality must seem terrific. It explains why the White House says Iraq is going great, the job market is strong, Saddam Hussein didn’t let U.N. weapons inspectors into his country, Iraq had ties to al Queda, etc.
All of these pronouncements obviously conflict with everything we know, but therein lies the problem. Bush doesn’t care what we know; he cares about what he believes. The truth is inconvenient, so it doesn’t really exist except for us annoying eggheads in the “reality-based community.”
I can understand Bush’s frustration. After all, reality-based people tend to ask questions. And Bush really doesn’t like questions.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush’s intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility — a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains — is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: “In meetings, I’d ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!”
Some stubborn people apparently still had inquisitive streaks, so naturally, Bush’s aides simply cracked down further so to shield the president from anyone that might try and bring reality to his attention.
By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush’s presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions — Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue — but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
Bush’s Dem critics are hardly the only ones who’ve noticed. Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, summarized this president’s worldview nicely.
“Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, “I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: “This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them….
“This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. “He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, “But you can’t run the world on faith.”
You can’t, but Bush is trying anyway. Fortunately, we’ll have one chance to stop this lunacy. It comes in just 15 days.