Get Results from Good Political Judgment

Bush's critics criticize so many things about him: he's not smart, he looks goofy, he takes a long vacation at his ranch when he should work in Washington. He mixes religion and politics too freely. His supporters mix religion and politics too freely. He's not articulate. Okay, so we know you don't like the guy. None of these criticisms is relevant. None of them gets at the question of results. None of them evaluates the president's performance with the single standard that matters: do his policies accomplish what the president himself says he wants to accomplish?

Let's take Bush's predecessor for purposes of comparison. A lot of people didn't like Clinton. He played around with an intern in the White House while his wife was traveling and lied about it. He did a lot of other dumb things before and after he became president, mostly because he couldn't keep his pants zipped up. Clinton admired Kennedy's leadership, and he seemed to emulate Kennedy's treatment of women, too. But no one that I know of ever said that Clinton was incompetent. Whatever you thought of his private missteps, he clearly knew how to do the job. It didn't matter whether he was a Baptist or a Catholic, whether he'd been a Rhodes scholar or a C student, whether he took long vacations or short ones. Not once during the impeachment proceedings did Clinton's opponents in Congress claim that he was incompetent.

Bush as a leader is clearly out of his depth. He cannot reason his way from the situation we are in to a desired outcome. The people he has selected to help him cannot do it either. The things he says are not true. He makes things up. Few people trust him. He's untrustworthy not because he's a schemer and a double-crosser, but because he doesn't know how to make judgments about the information he receives. He's energetic and he's shrewd about how to appeal to people's fears and prejudices, but he has poor political judgment. Poor judgment leads to a host of failures and deficiencies. Among other things, it explains why Bush's statements about the war in Iraq have so little connection with what's real.