Steve Benen has an (unintentionally) funny bit of business about George W. Bush's reflections on his time in office. It reads just a bit like an episode of The Office, with Bush in the Steve Carell role.
When I think about Bush, all the talk about how he was a "strong" leader seems to be backward. From what I've read about the man, he's quite the opposite. He seems to be driven primarily by insecurity. He doesn't like surrounding himself with people who disagree with him, especially people like Colin Powell who have a greater stature than Bush. He never asks questions at briefings (such as the notorious FEMA briefing about Katrina) because he doesn't want people to think he doesn't know everything. He never admits mistakes because he sees admitting he was wrong as a sign of weakness, famously, but why? It doesn't really make sense: admitting you were wrong and promising that lessons have been learned is only human, and it is honest. People like it when you are being straight with them. They don't like being lied to, especially when the truth is opposite and clear to see.
In other words, it's one thing to lie that a rescue mission is underway after a plane goes down. People understand that that sort of thing is necessary to save someone's life by throwing the bad guys off the track, and then you can tell them the truth afterward. It's a little different if CNN shows that the plane is down and you deny it even after the rescue has happened so as not to diminish troop morale at losing a plane. The former is comprehensible, the latter just makes you scratch your head and wonder, why not just confirm what everyone knows? Who takes comfort from knowing that the government is telling the proles the best possible story, even though everyone knows it's false? It's just weird. Oliver Stone's W. evidently felt that Bush was always haunted by the specter of his dad, which would account for some of the insecurity. I tend to think that it was more than that, though. The fact that Bush lacks facility with words, that he's not exactly the brightest or most innovative thinker out there has led, I think, to quite a bit of insecurity in his character. It's why he was pushing to be continually referred to as a "strong leader" in 2004 and seemed so energized about the notion, and it's why he has seemed so absent and defeated during the past two years, in a sort of "I'm picking up my toys and going home" manner. Nowadays, nobody gives a damn about him and he's extremely weak. I'm sure it's killing him.
In a way, I feel almost sorry for George W. Bush. He seems like the kind of guy who simply cannot live with a mistake like the Iraq War. Unfortunately, instead of deploying that conscientuousness in the service of avoiding Iraq Wars, Bush is able to push it to the side quite easily. As a rich guy who has never really had to face the consequences of his actions--more accurately, who has had them shielded from him--he is easily able to push the consequences of what he does out of his mind, or shift them from other people. Unlike Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, Bush was never a principled conservative. He (and his svengali, Karl Rove) were always more interested in gathering more power, and seemed to have few scruples about everything else taking a back seat. Maybe there were some vaguely-defined ideas to help "normal folks" out, but they did what was necessary to help themselves out first and foremost. What was Medicare Part D, if not an attempt to peel seniors off of the Democratic coalition? Ditto immigration with Latinos. One would be less cynical if these concepts weren't pitched to skeptical conservatives in exactly those terms.
In a sense, it is regrettable that Bush wasn't the figure he claimed to be, and the GOP is probably the worst off from the Bush years. A successful, center-right Bush Administration that reined in some of the extremists' worst tendencies might have kept the GOP in power and relevant for some time to come. Instead, Bush instituted a war on truth and reason largely because he could. He brought back the worst elements of McCarthyist thinking, once again as a power grab. You were either "with us" or a terrorist coddler. Democratic Senator Max Cleland was equated with bin Laden. John Kerry was the original Swift Boatee. He caused all the moderates to be stripped away from his party, leaving an ultra-right group of whackos consigned to the political bench for the forseeable future. It was all so unnecessary, in retrospect, as Bush was generally able to accomplish his goals even after the disaster of Iraq came into full focus. I remember a Roger Ebert review of Malice that noted that the film was the first to include a serial killer subplot just for atmosphere. Bush's time in office might be the first time that McCarthyism was employed just for the hell of it.
Why was such divisionism necessary? Because, quite simply, Bush was a mediocre man and a bad leader. He couldn't summon the strength to lead all the people of these United States on a grand purpose because he did not possess any such strength. He was only able to keep his opponents off balance for a while before everything crashed down on him. A lot of people were stunned when the Democrats didn't manage to win in 2004, but I think it was stunning that it was even close. Only three years after 9/11 George W. Bush won a narrow victory in a presidential election. It would have been like F.D.R. having undergone a nailbiter win over Tom Dewey in 1944. That Roosevelt won a crushing landslide while Bush narrowly won tells you that winning and holding political power has much to do with success and not so much with spin.
And that leads to one of the Bush Administration's singular insight: that you could distract people from a disastrous economy and war with spin! Clearly, these guys had a pretty low opinion of Americans. And, reassuringly, it was misplaced. But it's not unlike an oil company CEO trying to spin themselves out of a tanker crash that kills a thousand penguins. There's no play there. Despite attempts to blame liberals and the media for ignoring all the good news of Bushdom (attempts that will, no doubt, continue for some time to come), they predictably didn't work.
Great leaders unite, bad leaders divide. It is too early if Barack Obama will be a member of the former group, though it is not entirely implausible. For all the talk among Bush's inner circle of his having a Truman-like revival, the fact remains that Truman was unpopular because he made a few unpopular decisions that nobody remembers right now (is anyone still upset that he fired Doug MacArthur?) and are irrelevant in retrospect. There is a huge gulf between the two men: Harry Truman was a wise leader and a strong man who did what he thought was right even when it was unpopular, e.g. desegration of the military and firing MacArthur. Bush did unpopular things, but they were usually unpopular because of mistakes he made initially, like having an under-equipped force for invading Iraq or invading Iraq to begin with, and he refused to make things right when they were costly afterward.
And so it is clear for all to see that George W. Bush's inherent weaknesses were what did him in. One can talk about his intellectual deficiencies all day, but to my mind the characterological deficiencies are more damning. Even if he hadn't waged the Iraq War, it is inconceivable to me that Bush would have been a good president: between his gnawing insecurity and adjascent need to prove himself, his inability to see himself and his faults clearly, and his inability to lead anyone other than rabid ideologues who agree with him, we have seen a man who was compromised before he set foot in the Oval Office. It was only a matter of time before everyone else--save the delusional--figured it out. And we have. I don't know if George W. Bush is the worst president ever, but as a leader and a man I should say that we have scarcely encountered worse.
