Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Sunday Question for Conservatives
What lessons from the George W. Bush presidency -- positive or negative -- are you taking with you when it comes to selecting a presidential candidate for 2016?
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Sunday Question for Conservatives
I don't remember asking this one, at least not recently. George W. Bush: looking better in retrospect? Worse?
Monday, June 24, 2013
Very Mildly Cranky Monday Blogging
Ah, Monday Cranky Blogging. It's been a while. I'm not sure why; it's possible it's because the Sunday newspapers are running fewer annoying pieces...and it's possible it's because I'm less willing to read, and thus get annoyed by, the ones most likely to get me upset.
Which gets to a mostly solid Sunday column by the always excellent David Leonhardt about the judicial confirmation battles. Leonhardt looks at the claims and counterclaims about how much obstruction there's been, and concludes that obstruction of circuit court nominees has been about the same during Barack Obama's presidency as it was during the George W. Bush years, but that the obstruction of district court nominees has been worse.
I think that's basically the right story to tell. So why am I a bit cranky?
Leonhardt could have done a bit more about obstruction at the initial nomination stage, but at least he mentioned the "blue slip" problem, and he had limited space to work with, so that's pretty good, actually.
However, the item really is missing anything about partisan context.
The current Congress has had either 55 or 54 Democrats; the 109th Congress, in 2005-2006, had 55 Republicans. That's a dead even tie.
The previous Congress, 2011-2012, had 53 Democrats; the 108th, 2003-2004, had 51 Republicans. So Obama had a slightly better partisan context for his second Congress.
But the Congress they had at the beginning of their first terms were wildly different. For most of the 107th Congress, Democrats held a 51-49 majority; for about five months at the beginning, Republicans had a slim 50-50 majority, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie and allowing them to organize the body. For Obama, the historic 111th varied between 58, 59, and 60 Democrats -- a lopsided majority, and sometimes a filibuster-proof (sort of) supermajority.
That's a big deal! For one thing -- blocking the president's judicial nominees with a majority is really a much different thing than blocking them with a minority. In general, I don't think presidents are entitled to the people they want on the bench; if they select judges that the majority of the Senate opposes, then that's not really "obstruction" in the same way that using parliamentary procedures to push back a vote or to prevent one altogether is.
The bottom line is that there's no reason to have expected Bush's nominees in 2001-200 to have been as successful as Obama's in 2009-2010, all things being equal -- including out-party opposition.
As I said, overall it's an excellent item. Just excluding this one point makes me, oh, a little cranky.
Which gets to a mostly solid Sunday column by the always excellent David Leonhardt about the judicial confirmation battles. Leonhardt looks at the claims and counterclaims about how much obstruction there's been, and concludes that obstruction of circuit court nominees has been about the same during Barack Obama's presidency as it was during the George W. Bush years, but that the obstruction of district court nominees has been worse.
I think that's basically the right story to tell. So why am I a bit cranky?
Leonhardt could have done a bit more about obstruction at the initial nomination stage, but at least he mentioned the "blue slip" problem, and he had limited space to work with, so that's pretty good, actually.
However, the item really is missing anything about partisan context.
The current Congress has had either 55 or 54 Democrats; the 109th Congress, in 2005-2006, had 55 Republicans. That's a dead even tie.
The previous Congress, 2011-2012, had 53 Democrats; the 108th, 2003-2004, had 51 Republicans. So Obama had a slightly better partisan context for his second Congress.
But the Congress they had at the beginning of their first terms were wildly different. For most of the 107th Congress, Democrats held a 51-49 majority; for about five months at the beginning, Republicans had a slim 50-50 majority, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie and allowing them to organize the body. For Obama, the historic 111th varied between 58, 59, and 60 Democrats -- a lopsided majority, and sometimes a filibuster-proof (sort of) supermajority.
That's a big deal! For one thing -- blocking the president's judicial nominees with a majority is really a much different thing than blocking them with a minority. In general, I don't think presidents are entitled to the people they want on the bench; if they select judges that the majority of the Senate opposes, then that's not really "obstruction" in the same way that using parliamentary procedures to push back a vote or to prevent one altogether is.
The bottom line is that there's no reason to have expected Bush's nominees in 2001-200 to have been as successful as Obama's in 2009-2010, all things being equal -- including out-party opposition.
As I said, overall it's an excellent item. Just excluding this one point makes me, oh, a little cranky.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
PEPFAR and the Presidency
I have a new column up over at TAP about the presidency, about how the presidency we have isn't particularly Constitution-based. It goes along with last week's column there, which was about why the myth of the magical heroic-king presidency is so persistent; this one is about how our ideas about the presidency gain strength because the Constitutional version is such an empty shell.
I used an example at the end about how George W. Bush's program to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, PEPFAR, was in part a reaction to the "need" for him to have something feel-good to say in his 2003 SOTU speech. As it happens, I also use that initiative as an example of something else about the presidency, so I'll use this excuse to tell that one, too.
What I find in explaining the Neustadtian presidency is that the hard part for people to grasp is the part about how the bargaining presidency needs to do "persuade" people and groups to do things across the board. Everyone understands that Congress doesn't have to do what presidents want (even if they often forget it; see, again, that magical hero-king), but the rest of it seems less intuitive to many people. Sometimes that's because there's a basic assumption that, say, the executive branch has to do what presidents say...that's one of the reasons I find Watergate so interesting, since it's chock full of examples of executive branch agencies and departments ignoring what Nixon wanted.
Then there's the president's political party, and party-aligned interest groups. Here, I think the assumption is again too often that they will do whatever the president says; presidents are the "leaders" of the party. But that's wrong; parties, and party-aligned groups, are autonomous, and there's little inherent hierarchical structure. It's often in the interest of the party to go along with the president, but any president who thinks he can just issue edicts and have the party fall in line will be very disappointed -- as George W. Bush was when he tried to put a buddy on the Supreme Court.
Anyway, to PEPFAR: I really like this example, but I do have one problem, which is that I'm not entirely sure it's true. I always include that disclaimer when I use it....at one point, I wasted a few hours trying to track it down in sort of a half-assed way, and failed, and concluded that I might as well just keep using it as long as I always remember to mention that I'm not sure whether it's correct or not.
The point of the story is that presidents are always asking people for things that those people are free to refuse. In this case, the president was George W. Bush, the people were Christian conservatives, and what Bush was asking for was for them to look the other way. Why? Bush, for various sensible presidential reasons (oh, and perhaps also because it was a Good Thing, I suppose) wanted to do something about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. The problem? Doing something about the epidemic was going to mean US money paying for condoms, and a lot of Christian conservatives really don't like condoms. If they opposed the initiative, then the Republican Congress probably wasn't going to pass it, at least not in a form in which it could actually work.
Bush didn't need Christian conservative groups to support the program. He just needed them to look the other way. Which they didn't have to do!
Again, whether that's fictional or not, it's not unusual. Think, for example, about same-sex couples (and the groups who lobby on their behalf) and the current immigration bill.
The point is that Bush couldn't order Christian conservatives to look the other way. He had to "persuade" them. Usually, that's going to take the form of bargaining of some sort, either in particular deals, or more generally keeping a group "on board" enough that it will go along.
Presidents, as Neustadt says, have more things to bargain with than anyone else in the political system; they also, however, have more things to ask for, and more people to ask, than anyone else.
At any rate, the Prospect column isn't very newsy, but it does get at one of the core issues with the presidency, I hope. It's just a very difficult office to nail down, and it has been from the start.
I used an example at the end about how George W. Bush's program to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, PEPFAR, was in part a reaction to the "need" for him to have something feel-good to say in his 2003 SOTU speech. As it happens, I also use that initiative as an example of something else about the presidency, so I'll use this excuse to tell that one, too.
What I find in explaining the Neustadtian presidency is that the hard part for people to grasp is the part about how the bargaining presidency needs to do "persuade" people and groups to do things across the board. Everyone understands that Congress doesn't have to do what presidents want (even if they often forget it; see, again, that magical hero-king), but the rest of it seems less intuitive to many people. Sometimes that's because there's a basic assumption that, say, the executive branch has to do what presidents say...that's one of the reasons I find Watergate so interesting, since it's chock full of examples of executive branch agencies and departments ignoring what Nixon wanted.
Then there's the president's political party, and party-aligned interest groups. Here, I think the assumption is again too often that they will do whatever the president says; presidents are the "leaders" of the party. But that's wrong; parties, and party-aligned groups, are autonomous, and there's little inherent hierarchical structure. It's often in the interest of the party to go along with the president, but any president who thinks he can just issue edicts and have the party fall in line will be very disappointed -- as George W. Bush was when he tried to put a buddy on the Supreme Court.
Anyway, to PEPFAR: I really like this example, but I do have one problem, which is that I'm not entirely sure it's true. I always include that disclaimer when I use it....at one point, I wasted a few hours trying to track it down in sort of a half-assed way, and failed, and concluded that I might as well just keep using it as long as I always remember to mention that I'm not sure whether it's correct or not.
The point of the story is that presidents are always asking people for things that those people are free to refuse. In this case, the president was George W. Bush, the people were Christian conservatives, and what Bush was asking for was for them to look the other way. Why? Bush, for various sensible presidential reasons (oh, and perhaps also because it was a Good Thing, I suppose) wanted to do something about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. The problem? Doing something about the epidemic was going to mean US money paying for condoms, and a lot of Christian conservatives really don't like condoms. If they opposed the initiative, then the Republican Congress probably wasn't going to pass it, at least not in a form in which it could actually work.
Bush didn't need Christian conservative groups to support the program. He just needed them to look the other way. Which they didn't have to do!
Again, whether that's fictional or not, it's not unusual. Think, for example, about same-sex couples (and the groups who lobby on their behalf) and the current immigration bill.
The point is that Bush couldn't order Christian conservatives to look the other way. He had to "persuade" them. Usually, that's going to take the form of bargaining of some sort, either in particular deals, or more generally keeping a group "on board" enough that it will go along.
Presidents, as Neustadt says, have more things to bargain with than anyone else in the political system; they also, however, have more things to ask for, and more people to ask, than anyone else.
At any rate, the Prospect column isn't very newsy, but it does get at one of the core issues with the presidency, I hope. It's just a very difficult office to nail down, and it has been from the start.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Presidential Approval Probably Isn't Stuck At Midrange
Ezra Klein poses a hypothesis I've heard a few times before at the end of a nice post earlier this week:
And yet...there's no reason to believe that polarization has advanced significantly in the last fifteen years, but George W. Bush's approval ratings were all over the place. Bush holds the highest spike in the history of Gallup, hitting a soaring 90%. And when he crashed, Bush bottomed out at 25%, lower than everyone but Truman and Nixon. Bush's first term was, overall, fourth-highest (and also fourth farthest from 50%); his second term is tied for second-lowest (and also tied for second farthest from 50%).
Conclusion? Most likely, Obama's approval ratings have stayed in a narrow range mainly because there really haven't been that many events, and those that have happened have roughly balanced out. The economy has mostly been the same from 2010 on -- recovering, but not recovering enough to get people thinking "prosperity." The same, really, with foreign affairs; with the exception of the bin Laden killing, the administration can't really offer peace, but also isn't running up the level of policy disaster that occurred during the Bush presidency...good news (out of Iraq! overall casualties in Afghanistan way down!) seem to be balanced by bad (Benghazi -- the real event, not the phony scandal; the Boston bombing; various high-profile attacks in Afghanistan).
Granted, it could be that it's harder for events now to move the needle, but the reaction to events during the Bush administration just makes me very skeptical of that.
Tucked inside Abramowitz’s take is an interesting structural prediction about American politics: As party polarization increases and the persuadable middle dwindles, scandals and gaffes will become less meaningful as they’ll only be able to convince those who want to be convinced. It’s not clear that the IRS mess, Benghazi, or the DoJ/AP issue will rise to the level of being a useful test of this thesis. But something will.It's tempting to believe that polarization is producing presidential approval results which are little more than reflections of partisanship. Barack Obama's Gallup approval history would seem to suggest that might be happening. His best rating of 69% ranks 10th best of the 12 presidents in the Gallup era, and is really in a tie for last with Nixon (67%), Reagan (68%), and perhaps Ford (71%). Everyone else had higher highs. And yet, at least to date, Obama's lowest point of 38% approval beats everyone but Ike and Kennedy. Obama's overall average to date is 49%; since the beginning of 2012, his weekly Gallup number has ranged higher than 55% and lower than 45% only once in each direction, and overall, outside of a brief honeymoon in 2009, he's been in that range almost his entire presidency.
And yet...there's no reason to believe that polarization has advanced significantly in the last fifteen years, but George W. Bush's approval ratings were all over the place. Bush holds the highest spike in the history of Gallup, hitting a soaring 90%. And when he crashed, Bush bottomed out at 25%, lower than everyone but Truman and Nixon. Bush's first term was, overall, fourth-highest (and also fourth farthest from 50%); his second term is tied for second-lowest (and also tied for second farthest from 50%).
Conclusion? Most likely, Obama's approval ratings have stayed in a narrow range mainly because there really haven't been that many events, and those that have happened have roughly balanced out. The economy has mostly been the same from 2010 on -- recovering, but not recovering enough to get people thinking "prosperity." The same, really, with foreign affairs; with the exception of the bin Laden killing, the administration can't really offer peace, but also isn't running up the level of policy disaster that occurred during the Bush presidency...good news (out of Iraq! overall casualties in Afghanistan way down!) seem to be balanced by bad (Benghazi -- the real event, not the phony scandal; the Boston bombing; various high-profile attacks in Afghanistan).
Granted, it could be that it's harder for events now to move the needle, but the reaction to events during the Bush administration just makes me very skeptical of that.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Oy, Fournier
Say what?
Why does this matter? Because a president’s credibility matters. President Bush’s second term effectively ended when Americans grew tired of his administration’s spinning and dissembling over Iraq and Katrina. They stopped trusting him. They stopped listening to him. He no longer had the moral authority to lead.
That's Ron Fournier on Benghazi and the IRS story, and it's dead wrong.
What hurt, and then destroyed, Bush's approval ratings was very simple: events. There was no way to spin the ongoing policy disaster in Iraq from summer 2003 through, well, pretty much the end of the Bush Administration. There was no way to spin the drowning of a major US city (including the parts of that which were mostly unfair to the administration). There was no way to spin a recession from the end of 2007 on, or the financial disaster in fall 2008.
Generally, if we follow Neustadt, it's better to think of these "credibility gap" arguments has applying mainly to Washingtonians -- people who directly or indirectly deal with the president -- rather than to mass publics. Voters, as such, don't pay close attention to whether the president is trustworthy, at least not as a separate category from whether they think much of him, which in turn is probably not really a separate category from (1) partisanship and (2) events.
That's easy to see in the presidency of Bill Clinton, right? Clinton certainly lied, and was caught lying, with regard to the Lewinsky scandal. But his popularity went up during that period. Why? Surely not because of his "moral authority to lead!" No, it was because of every president's best friends, peace and prosperity.
Now, obviously, it is possible for scandals to affect presidential popularity -- see Watergate in 1973-1974 and Iran-Contra in 1986-1987. But even then, my guess is that what the presidents did mattered as much as anything -- and of course, with Watergate, the lies were much larger and more consistent than anything that's even been hinted at so far with Obama.
I do think that presidential credibility matters in Washington. By the end of his presidency, neither Democrats nor Republicans really trusted George W. Bush very much, and that mattered -- see, for example, Republican resistance to TARP, among other things. But I think it's the wrong way to think about voter views of the president.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Sunday Question for Conservatives
George W. Bush: conservative president, or not? What's underrated about him? What does the conventional critique get right?
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Bush, Principles, and Presidenting
The discussion of George W. Bush's intelligence, or lack thereof, continues. My position on this, as I've said many times, is that I've heard him speak on baseball and he sounded sharp enough; I attributed the evidence of his presidency not as a lack of innate intelligence, but as a consequence of his lack of interest in the world of public affairs and policy.
Two new contributions worth looking at. Kevin Drum looks at Keith Hennessey's anecdotes intended to show Bush's smarts and sees, instead, impatience and lack of interest in details. And Ed Kilgore wants to blame GOP orthodoxy, and not Bush at all, for the policies Bush adopted and urged.
I think it's probably correct to say that Bush arrived at the policies he supported because they conformed to conservative ideology, or at least GOP orthodoxy, of the time. However, that's not good enough. All presidents are driven by what their party wants, and part of being a good president is finding ways to keep party actors happy. Even if it means supporting unpopular policies, in some cases.
But presidents also need to know when to resist the party when the party wants something that won't work -- for the sake of the party, among other reasons, even though many party actors won't accept that.
And even more critically, presidents have to resist the temptation to accept party ideas as invariably correct -- and then the temptation to try to do the right thing. Generally, presidents are asking for trouble when they try to do whatever they believe is, in the abstract, the "right thing." That's true if it's "right" for ideological reasons, as with (perhaps) Bush; it's true if it's "right" based on the president's moral intuition, as was the case with Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson.
Presidents do not have any special claim to superior moral intuition, no matter what Carter or George W. Bush seem to believe. Nor do they have any special ability to channel the beliefs of "the people," as Wilson believed. When they attempt to do so -- when they attempt to base policy choices on their principles -- they are apt to get it all wrong, because there's no institutional reason that they should get it right. We might as well select our presidents by lot.
What presidents do have -- and all elected officials have it, but presidents have more of it than anyone else in the system -- is access to the very best clues about what policies will be "viable" (in Neustadt's term). They have access to more, and more varied, information sources than anyone else. What's more, because their constituency is so large, they have access to the reactions of more, and more varied, organized groups than anyone else.Those reactions are often even better sources of information than the raw policy data that experts might give them (although to be sure the reactions of experts are an excellent source of information.
Good presidenting, perhaps more than anything else, is the art of extracting information from political action and actors. What does it mean when this general says that an occupation will take more troops than his bosses at the Defense Department say it will take? What does it mean when this DoD official (representing what faction? How?) disagrees? What does it mean when this ally objects to the course the United States is taking; what does it man when that ally goes along? How much weight to give private statements, and how much to give public? When is the support or opposition being given for a policy pro forma, and when is it sincere and intense? And what is that intense support or opposition really saying about the policy?
There are no magic formulas to answer those questions. It takes excellent governing skills: the ability to assess people and situations, deep knowledge of the political system and groups within it, a full sense of representational relationships. Some detailed policy knowledge can't hurt, although no president will have enough to substitute for those more general skills, and policy knowledge can even get in the way -- a determination to always do what's "right" can be just (almost?) as much of a problem if it's based on the president's personal policy expertise as it is if it's based on ideological principles or gut feelings.
So, yes, I do think it's true of all presidents that they are heavily influence by their party's positions, and that's as it should be. But presidents also must know when to push back against their party's positions (or ignore them, or give lip service support to them).
The difference, really, between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is that Reagan -- who surely was as much of an ideologue in some ways as Bush -- was at his best pretty good at seeing danger and avoiding it. George W. Bush? Spectacularly bad about seeing danger coming and avoiding it. That's not because Reagan (or other, even better presidents) had better "principles" or ideology or guts -- it's because they were excellent politicians. George W. Bush, alas, was a terrible politician, and a terrible president.
Two new contributions worth looking at. Kevin Drum looks at Keith Hennessey's anecdotes intended to show Bush's smarts and sees, instead, impatience and lack of interest in details. And Ed Kilgore wants to blame GOP orthodoxy, and not Bush at all, for the policies Bush adopted and urged.
I think it's probably correct to say that Bush arrived at the policies he supported because they conformed to conservative ideology, or at least GOP orthodoxy, of the time. However, that's not good enough. All presidents are driven by what their party wants, and part of being a good president is finding ways to keep party actors happy. Even if it means supporting unpopular policies, in some cases.
But presidents also need to know when to resist the party when the party wants something that won't work -- for the sake of the party, among other reasons, even though many party actors won't accept that.
And even more critically, presidents have to resist the temptation to accept party ideas as invariably correct -- and then the temptation to try to do the right thing. Generally, presidents are asking for trouble when they try to do whatever they believe is, in the abstract, the "right thing." That's true if it's "right" for ideological reasons, as with (perhaps) Bush; it's true if it's "right" based on the president's moral intuition, as was the case with Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson.
Presidents do not have any special claim to superior moral intuition, no matter what Carter or George W. Bush seem to believe. Nor do they have any special ability to channel the beliefs of "the people," as Wilson believed. When they attempt to do so -- when they attempt to base policy choices on their principles -- they are apt to get it all wrong, because there's no institutional reason that they should get it right. We might as well select our presidents by lot.
What presidents do have -- and all elected officials have it, but presidents have more of it than anyone else in the system -- is access to the very best clues about what policies will be "viable" (in Neustadt's term). They have access to more, and more varied, information sources than anyone else. What's more, because their constituency is so large, they have access to the reactions of more, and more varied, organized groups than anyone else.Those reactions are often even better sources of information than the raw policy data that experts might give them (although to be sure the reactions of experts are an excellent source of information.
Good presidenting, perhaps more than anything else, is the art of extracting information from political action and actors. What does it mean when this general says that an occupation will take more troops than his bosses at the Defense Department say it will take? What does it mean when this DoD official (representing what faction? How?) disagrees? What does it mean when this ally objects to the course the United States is taking; what does it man when that ally goes along? How much weight to give private statements, and how much to give public? When is the support or opposition being given for a policy pro forma, and when is it sincere and intense? And what is that intense support or opposition really saying about the policy?
There are no magic formulas to answer those questions. It takes excellent governing skills: the ability to assess people and situations, deep knowledge of the political system and groups within it, a full sense of representational relationships. Some detailed policy knowledge can't hurt, although no president will have enough to substitute for those more general skills, and policy knowledge can even get in the way -- a determination to always do what's "right" can be just (almost?) as much of a problem if it's based on the president's personal policy expertise as it is if it's based on ideological principles or gut feelings.
So, yes, I do think it's true of all presidents that they are heavily influence by their party's positions, and that's as it should be. But presidents also must know when to push back against their party's positions (or ignore them, or give lip service support to them).
The difference, really, between Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is that Reagan -- who surely was as much of an ideologue in some ways as Bush -- was at his best pretty good at seeing danger and avoiding it. George W. Bush? Spectacularly bad about seeing danger coming and avoiding it. That's not because Reagan (or other, even better presidents) had better "principles" or ideology or guts -- it's because they were excellent politicians. George W. Bush, alas, was a terrible politician, and a terrible president.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Valerie Bertinelli, 53. Yes, of course I watch her retread show on TVLand, although I watch it the old fashioned way -- when I happen to see it when I'm flipping around the dial. If you haven't seen it...it's exactly what it should be, no better but no worse. Excellent idea, though.
Some good stuff:
1. Jay Ulfelder's guide for social scientists on twitter.
2. Dan Amira on the (un)reliability of Rand Paul on civil liberties issues.
3. 2016 (Republican) rules update, from Josh Putnam.
4. More on studies of the health care cost slow-down, from Sarah Kliff.
5. Nice Sean Trende item on the gun bill and midterms.
6. And Dan Larison on George W. Bush's foreign policy.
Some good stuff:
1. Jay Ulfelder's guide for social scientists on twitter.
2. Dan Amira on the (un)reliability of Rand Paul on civil liberties issues.
3. 2016 (Republican) rules update, from Josh Putnam.
4. More on studies of the health care cost slow-down, from Sarah Kliff.
5. Nice Sean Trende item on the gun bill and midterms.
6. And Dan Larison on George W. Bush's foreign policy.
Monday, April 22, 2013
The Wrath of the Conquest of the Planet of the Bride of the Son of the Return of Cranky Blogging
It's not exactly about any one thing in particular, but just thinking about the horrific mistake that GOP governors made in 1999 to put some guy who had no real interest in government or public affairs into the Oval Office...well, it sure makes me cranky every time I think about it.
Fine, I suppose there's more; there's a news peg to it. George W. Bush's presidential library is about to open, and so we're getting Bush stuff all over the press, such as this National Journal piece on Bush's "Reluctant Re-Emergence on the Political Scene" with a subheadline that "these days he's more interested in painting, golfing, and enjoying time away from politics."
Which makes me cranky because as far as I can see, he was always more interested in golf, baseball, and pretty much everything except the world of public affairs.
Oh, I think he enjoyed the game of electoral politics (is it too mean to say that he enjoyed it especially when he was winning? Perhaps). As Richard Ben Cramer taught us, the Bush family is nothing if not competitive. But beyond that? I find it very, very, easy to imagine that he paid little attention to public affairs either before or after his political career.
And I think that's highly unusual for politicians, and pretty much unheard of for presidents. Granted, it's not as if they're all Bill Clinton, who seems to be almost pathological in his obsession about policy, by all accounts (then, too, Clinton seems pathological in so many obsessions). Plenty of politicians appear to be highly interested in one realm of public affairs but relatively indifferent to others. And certainly many are drawn to politics as a career mainly because they love the power that it gives them, or because they like the attention, or whatever. But there's normally a reason that they become politicians and not, I don't know, rock stars.
That's even true for most dynastic politicians; they may have gone into the family business simply because it was the family business, but most of them absorbed interest in the world along with their choice of career. I'm not much of a fan of JFK or Al Gore, but I don't think anyone would accuse either of them, or George H.W. Bush for that matter, of having little interest in the world of public affairs. There are some politicians who seem to be far more interested in the processes of policy-making than the outcomes...I get the sense that Bob Dole was like that, for example, and I think a lot of Congressional leaders have been like that to a greater or lesser extent. But for them, mastery of process makes mastery of substance necessary, so it doesn't much matter.
If I'm right about Bush -- and, to be fair, it's possible we'll learn more in the future that will prove me wrong, although I doubt it -- then I can't think of anyone at a high level of politics even remotely comparable. All of which made him ill-equipped to cope with the presidency. All presidents have to deal with insufficient knowledge about public policy; Bush had far less, on far more topics, than most. And he had fewer successful (or, to be blunt, sober) life experiences to fall back on.
Anyway, my guess is that Bush's reputation will wind up if anything worse, not better, than his current reputation. Why? Because I suspect that when we get more information, we'll see more instances where he was indifferent, uninvolved, unprepared, easily manipulated, and generally not up for the job and not particularly interested in doing anything about it. In other words, I'm guessing that the worst stereotypes of him as president will turn out to be true -- and that his reputation, currently hurt by outcomes, will stay lousy or get worse as we learn more about process. Note: I twice there said "guess," and I mean it; I could be wrong! But I've yet to see any evidence that pushed me the other way.
Dan Drezner, while hardly defending Bush, thinks that there is some reason to believe his reputation will improve. Drezner says that Bush has been a good ex-president...but he's been "good" more in the sense of Gerald Ford (staying out of the way) rather than a Jimmy Carter, doing good works. I sort of expect that Bush will wind up doing good works the way that his father has, eventually, but he certainly isn't going to be a Carter or a Clinton. Nor will he, obviously, spend his retirement writing books about important issues, the way that Nixon did.
Drezner also thinks Bush will accrue "credit" because of what came after him, at least when it comes to Republicans and foreign policy/national security. I disagree! I think that Bush will -- properly -- be seen as responsible for that poor quality. After all, most of it comes from Bush's administration promoting people who are now responsible for much of that poor quality, and discrediting or undermining those who were more sound on those issues. Going back to the previous paragraph -- Bush deserves some blame for this post-presidency, too. It's true, and as Drezner said to Bush's credit, that in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks Bush worked against "anti-Muslim hysteria." But it was Bush Administration veterans who encouraged that sort of thing during the Obama years, and George W. Bush sat by and did nothing, when it's quite possible he could have made a difference.
And then Drezner gives Bush, or at least his economic team, credit for their actions in fall 2008. I don't know...I think it's more likely that historians will focus more on inaction leading into the economic disaster (or policies which actively brought it on) rather than policies which avoided even worse outcomes. In that sense, it's much like the Bush Iraq policy in his last two years in office; whatever good marks he gets for changing course, it's all in the context of rescuing a self-made disaster.
A have to mention this somewhere...there's torture. I mean, first of all, that Bush's administration adopted torture as policy. Even if we want to give a very generous reading of things, it's still a terrible mark against him. And again: I do think that Bush is the one person capable of preventing the Republican Party from becoming the pro-torture party, or at least of dramatically changing the odds of it happening, and he hasn't done it. On top of that, there's the civil liberties record...yes, all presidents (Madison excepted) do poorly on that during wartime, and on civil liberties it's hard to say that Bush was the worst, but still he was pretty awful, and that's apt to look bad to future historians.
Despite all this, we're already seeing and are sure to see revisionist stuff about Bush, most of it perfectly evidence-free.
The whole thing is enough to make me very, very cranky.
Fine, I suppose there's more; there's a news peg to it. George W. Bush's presidential library is about to open, and so we're getting Bush stuff all over the press, such as this National Journal piece on Bush's "Reluctant Re-Emergence on the Political Scene" with a subheadline that "these days he's more interested in painting, golfing, and enjoying time away from politics."
Which makes me cranky because as far as I can see, he was always more interested in golf, baseball, and pretty much everything except the world of public affairs.
Oh, I think he enjoyed the game of electoral politics (is it too mean to say that he enjoyed it especially when he was winning? Perhaps). As Richard Ben Cramer taught us, the Bush family is nothing if not competitive. But beyond that? I find it very, very, easy to imagine that he paid little attention to public affairs either before or after his political career.
And I think that's highly unusual for politicians, and pretty much unheard of for presidents. Granted, it's not as if they're all Bill Clinton, who seems to be almost pathological in his obsession about policy, by all accounts (then, too, Clinton seems pathological in so many obsessions). Plenty of politicians appear to be highly interested in one realm of public affairs but relatively indifferent to others. And certainly many are drawn to politics as a career mainly because they love the power that it gives them, or because they like the attention, or whatever. But there's normally a reason that they become politicians and not, I don't know, rock stars.
That's even true for most dynastic politicians; they may have gone into the family business simply because it was the family business, but most of them absorbed interest in the world along with their choice of career. I'm not much of a fan of JFK or Al Gore, but I don't think anyone would accuse either of them, or George H.W. Bush for that matter, of having little interest in the world of public affairs. There are some politicians who seem to be far more interested in the processes of policy-making than the outcomes...I get the sense that Bob Dole was like that, for example, and I think a lot of Congressional leaders have been like that to a greater or lesser extent. But for them, mastery of process makes mastery of substance necessary, so it doesn't much matter.
If I'm right about Bush -- and, to be fair, it's possible we'll learn more in the future that will prove me wrong, although I doubt it -- then I can't think of anyone at a high level of politics even remotely comparable. All of which made him ill-equipped to cope with the presidency. All presidents have to deal with insufficient knowledge about public policy; Bush had far less, on far more topics, than most. And he had fewer successful (or, to be blunt, sober) life experiences to fall back on.
Anyway, my guess is that Bush's reputation will wind up if anything worse, not better, than his current reputation. Why? Because I suspect that when we get more information, we'll see more instances where he was indifferent, uninvolved, unprepared, easily manipulated, and generally not up for the job and not particularly interested in doing anything about it. In other words, I'm guessing that the worst stereotypes of him as president will turn out to be true -- and that his reputation, currently hurt by outcomes, will stay lousy or get worse as we learn more about process. Note: I twice there said "guess," and I mean it; I could be wrong! But I've yet to see any evidence that pushed me the other way.
Dan Drezner, while hardly defending Bush, thinks that there is some reason to believe his reputation will improve. Drezner says that Bush has been a good ex-president...but he's been "good" more in the sense of Gerald Ford (staying out of the way) rather than a Jimmy Carter, doing good works. I sort of expect that Bush will wind up doing good works the way that his father has, eventually, but he certainly isn't going to be a Carter or a Clinton. Nor will he, obviously, spend his retirement writing books about important issues, the way that Nixon did.
Drezner also thinks Bush will accrue "credit" because of what came after him, at least when it comes to Republicans and foreign policy/national security. I disagree! I think that Bush will -- properly -- be seen as responsible for that poor quality. After all, most of it comes from Bush's administration promoting people who are now responsible for much of that poor quality, and discrediting or undermining those who were more sound on those issues. Going back to the previous paragraph -- Bush deserves some blame for this post-presidency, too. It's true, and as Drezner said to Bush's credit, that in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks Bush worked against "anti-Muslim hysteria." But it was Bush Administration veterans who encouraged that sort of thing during the Obama years, and George W. Bush sat by and did nothing, when it's quite possible he could have made a difference.
And then Drezner gives Bush, or at least his economic team, credit for their actions in fall 2008. I don't know...I think it's more likely that historians will focus more on inaction leading into the economic disaster (or policies which actively brought it on) rather than policies which avoided even worse outcomes. In that sense, it's much like the Bush Iraq policy in his last two years in office; whatever good marks he gets for changing course, it's all in the context of rescuing a self-made disaster.
A have to mention this somewhere...there's torture. I mean, first of all, that Bush's administration adopted torture as policy. Even if we want to give a very generous reading of things, it's still a terrible mark against him. And again: I do think that Bush is the one person capable of preventing the Republican Party from becoming the pro-torture party, or at least of dramatically changing the odds of it happening, and he hasn't done it. On top of that, there's the civil liberties record...yes, all presidents (Madison excepted) do poorly on that during wartime, and on civil liberties it's hard to say that Bush was the worst, but still he was pretty awful, and that's apt to look bad to future historians.
Despite all this, we're already seeing and are sure to see revisionist stuff about Bush, most of it perfectly evidence-free.
The whole thing is enough to make me very, very cranky.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Obama Tracks W. Approval...Still
Barack Obama's Gallup approval rating ticked up to 50% today. It's the third time he's reached that mark over the last couple months, but both times previously he fell below 50% the next day; he hasn't had consecutive days at or above 50% since late February. In fact, there's a clear break: through the reading ending February 28 he was at or above 50% all but four days beginning with the November 7-9 survey; after that, 50% has been the peak.
What's fun to look at, at least for me, is that he's still closely tracking George W. Bush's approval ratings. Of course, that wasn't the case in the first three years of Obama's presidency. In the first several months he was more popular than Bush; after September 11, he of course fell far behind Bush's record performance.
But Obama caught Bush in spring 2012 (vs. spring 2004), and ever since they've been within a few points of each other. And so the most recent Bush 2005 poll, April 4-7, has him at...50% approval. Uncanny!
At this point, however, Bush was fading. He managed to spike up again to 50% for May 2-5, but that was the last time he would reach that point. Still, he was in the highish 40s (in other words, where Obama has been for the last six weeks) all the way to mid-July. So unless Obama moves sharply one way or another, they'll still be pretty close for a while.
No real larger point here. The two of them, Bush and Obama, were the least popular presidents re-elected after a full term during the polling era, and that's still true now, five months after the election. Not for long, though; Nixon is about to dive down below both of them.
What's fun to look at, at least for me, is that he's still closely tracking George W. Bush's approval ratings. Of course, that wasn't the case in the first three years of Obama's presidency. In the first several months he was more popular than Bush; after September 11, he of course fell far behind Bush's record performance.
But Obama caught Bush in spring 2012 (vs. spring 2004), and ever since they've been within a few points of each other. And so the most recent Bush 2005 poll, April 4-7, has him at...50% approval. Uncanny!
At this point, however, Bush was fading. He managed to spike up again to 50% for May 2-5, but that was the last time he would reach that point. Still, he was in the highish 40s (in other words, where Obama has been for the last six weeks) all the way to mid-July. So unless Obama moves sharply one way or another, they'll still be pretty close for a while.
No real larger point here. The two of them, Bush and Obama, were the least popular presidents re-elected after a full term during the polling era, and that's still true now, five months after the election. Not for long, though; Nixon is about to dive down below both of them.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
A "Lesson of Iraq" Which I Thought Everyone Learned But I Guess Not
Reading over all of the Iraq stuff this week, I'm sort of stunned that almost everyone -- supporters, opponents then, supporters then who believe they were wrong -- are still using the phrase "weapons of mass destruction."
Cut it out, everyone.
"Weapons of mass destruction" was a stupid category then, and it's a stupid category now.
Unless it's for a critique of the poor thinking that went on then, no one should use it. Ever.
Cut it out, everyone.
"Weapons of mass destruction" was a stupid category then, and it's a stupid category now.
Unless it's for a critique of the poor thinking that went on then, no one should use it. Ever.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Catch of the Day
He wasn't responding to me, but Jonathan Chait demolishes a point I made last night -- that what Mitt Romney was doing in being misleading about his own programs was unusual. Chait points out that George W. Bush's defense of his tax plan in 2000 was almost identical to what Romney was up to last night.
I'm not going to go through the transcripts, but I think my point would be saved a bit by the rest of it. I don't recall Bush being particularly dishonest on his education plan, or his faith-based initiative. Of course, all candidates spin their proposals to put them in the best possible light; there's nothing unusual, or even bad, about that. Nor is it unusual for candidates to avoid taking any position at all. What seemed weird to me about Romney is that he's taking positions, but then lying about them.
And if I'm right about Bush on the other issues, then Romney is still unusual in that he's doing this more or less across the board -- it's on health care, and spending, and deficits, too.
Or maybe not. At any rate: nice catch!
I'm not going to go through the transcripts, but I think my point would be saved a bit by the rest of it. I don't recall Bush being particularly dishonest on his education plan, or his faith-based initiative. Of course, all candidates spin their proposals to put them in the best possible light; there's nothing unusual, or even bad, about that. Nor is it unusual for candidates to avoid taking any position at all. What seemed weird to me about Romney is that he's taking positions, but then lying about them.
And if I'm right about Bush on the other issues, then Romney is still unusual in that he's doing this more or less across the board -- it's on health care, and spending, and deficits, too.
Or maybe not. At any rate: nice catch!
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
The 1980s: A Distant, Distant Era
I don't have time before sunset to do a proper takedown of Marc Theissen's incredibly weak defense of his idea that it's very, very, important that Barack Obama mostly uses written instead of oral daily security briefings, following fact-checker Glenn Kessler's thorough demolishing of the Theissen's original piece, which has been updated to reflect the latest from Theissen. Kessler was, shall we say, not impressed. Nor was Alex Pareene.
See, the problem for Theissen is that it turns out that most presidents preferred written to oral briefings, including Ronald Reagan. Which is a bit of a problem, since Reagan was perfect in every way, right?
Anyway, other than advising everyone to be very careful any time anyone says that "everything changed" on September 11, 2001 -- or the even more ludicrous idea that the threats facing George W. Bush and Barack Obama after that date were more serious than what Cold War presidents faced -- and laughing at the idea that somehow George W. Bush's national security habits are somehow self-evidently what anyone should be emulating -- I only really have one serious thing to say about it. Which is to marvel at the idea that, according to Theissen, Reagan and Richard Nixon served during "an era when advanced technology consisted of electric typewriters." I mean, I realize that it must be tough to be assigned the tough challenge of explaining why it's a disaster for Barack Obama to use a Ronald Reagan method instead of a George W. Bush method, but Theissen really should have stuck to the all-purpose howler about 9/11 changing everything. The guy is making Bob Woodward look good.
For the record: no, the primitive state of technology in the 1980s, 1970s, or 1950s, during which time presidents communicated via tin cans with strings and "surveillance" meant asking people to pose for Matthew Brady-style photographs, did not slow the pace of foreign affairs to the extent that "The volume, speed and complexity of intelligence has changed dramatically in the intervening decades — and with it the need for interactive briefings." I think anyone who has even a vague appreciation of, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis would just laugh at that idea.
Bottom line is that if the main evidence that oral briefings work best for giving the president the best intelligence is the record of George W. Bush, I'd certainly hope that subsequent presidents figure out a different way of doing things.
See, the problem for Theissen is that it turns out that most presidents preferred written to oral briefings, including Ronald Reagan. Which is a bit of a problem, since Reagan was perfect in every way, right?
Anyway, other than advising everyone to be very careful any time anyone says that "everything changed" on September 11, 2001 -- or the even more ludicrous idea that the threats facing George W. Bush and Barack Obama after that date were more serious than what Cold War presidents faced -- and laughing at the idea that somehow George W. Bush's national security habits are somehow self-evidently what anyone should be emulating -- I only really have one serious thing to say about it. Which is to marvel at the idea that, according to Theissen, Reagan and Richard Nixon served during "an era when advanced technology consisted of electric typewriters." I mean, I realize that it must be tough to be assigned the tough challenge of explaining why it's a disaster for Barack Obama to use a Ronald Reagan method instead of a George W. Bush method, but Theissen really should have stuck to the all-purpose howler about 9/11 changing everything. The guy is making Bob Woodward look good.
For the record: no, the primitive state of technology in the 1980s, 1970s, or 1950s, during which time presidents communicated via tin cans with strings and "surveillance" meant asking people to pose for Matthew Brady-style photographs, did not slow the pace of foreign affairs to the extent that "The volume, speed and complexity of intelligence has changed dramatically in the intervening decades — and with it the need for interactive briefings." I think anyone who has even a vague appreciation of, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis would just laugh at that idea.
Bottom line is that if the main evidence that oral briefings work best for giving the president the best intelligence is the record of George W. Bush, I'd certainly hope that subsequent presidents figure out a different way of doing things.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Elsewhere: Media Hype, Various Flavors
At Plum Line, I noted that reporters and pundits are overhyping each new economic report, and tried to provide a bit of context for how to take new economic reports seriously without overdoing it. And over at Post Partisan, I took a shot at Politico and at Dave Weigel for overhyping possible revelations-to-come about Barack Obama's background.
It seems to me that this latter sort of mistake happens all the time. For example, in 2004 the real message about stories about George W. Bush's National Guard service was that by 2004, absolutely no one cared any more. Well, that's not quite right; lots of liberals wanted to finally, once and for all, prove that Bush was a shirker, or whatever it was that they were proving. And if we're interested in Bush's biography, sure, that's of interest. But as a voting point in 2004? No way. People were going to vote based on the recovery from his early-term recession, and from his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and Iraq, and whatever issues people generally vote on. I'm very skeptical whether an incumbent president's (apparent, perceived, broadcast) personality matters very much at all, but to the extent it does everyone was already heavily invested in whatever they thought of the guy, and while events might change that, it's highly unlikely that revelations about his early life would. Same, of course, with Bill Clinton and the various pre-presidential scandals Republicans cared about in 1996.
I suspect that the dynamic that matters here is repeated each time: the out-party just can't believe that anyone would actually like this guy, and if only we can turn up one more piece of information, that will finally open their eyes about him. It's not true, of course, but I guess I can understand why it seems that it might be. For partisans, that is; there's really no reason for the press to fall for it.
It seems to me that this latter sort of mistake happens all the time. For example, in 2004 the real message about stories about George W. Bush's National Guard service was that by 2004, absolutely no one cared any more. Well, that's not quite right; lots of liberals wanted to finally, once and for all, prove that Bush was a shirker, or whatever it was that they were proving. And if we're interested in Bush's biography, sure, that's of interest. But as a voting point in 2004? No way. People were going to vote based on the recovery from his early-term recession, and from his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and Iraq, and whatever issues people generally vote on. I'm very skeptical whether an incumbent president's (apparent, perceived, broadcast) personality matters very much at all, but to the extent it does everyone was already heavily invested in whatever they thought of the guy, and while events might change that, it's highly unlikely that revelations about his early life would. Same, of course, with Bill Clinton and the various pre-presidential scandals Republicans cared about in 1996.
I suspect that the dynamic that matters here is repeated each time: the out-party just can't believe that anyone would actually like this guy, and if only we can turn up one more piece of information, that will finally open their eyes about him. It's not true, of course, but I guess I can understand why it seems that it might be. For partisans, that is; there's really no reason for the press to fall for it.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Read Stuff, You Should
Happy Birthday to Neftali Feliz, 24, who gave the Blue Sox (and, I suppose, the Rangers) two solid years out of the bullpen.
Good stuff?
1. Interesting observation from Ezra Klein: columnists produced by the Bush Administration were mostly speechwriters and other p.r. specialists, while those produced by the Obama Administration were substantive experts, mostly economists. Might be true!
2. Paul Krugman debates Ron Paul, and realizes the uselessness of debates. True enough, although I'm in favor of candidate debates despite their uselessness.
3. Shira Toeplitz on how the Dick Lugar campaign went wrong. Big question: if Lugar loses, which seems very likely now, who will win the spin? Will GOP Senators take it as a warning to never cross the Tea Partiers, or a warning to keep a house back home, take the campaign seriously, and other non-ideological stuff?
4. And you all wanted to know the answer to Roman inflation in the third century, didn't you? Matt Yglesias has it.
Good stuff?
1. Interesting observation from Ezra Klein: columnists produced by the Bush Administration were mostly speechwriters and other p.r. specialists, while those produced by the Obama Administration were substantive experts, mostly economists. Might be true!
2. Paul Krugman debates Ron Paul, and realizes the uselessness of debates. True enough, although I'm in favor of candidate debates despite their uselessness.
3. Shira Toeplitz on how the Dick Lugar campaign went wrong. Big question: if Lugar loses, which seems very likely now, who will win the spin? Will GOP Senators take it as a warning to never cross the Tea Partiers, or a warning to keep a house back home, take the campaign seriously, and other non-ideological stuff?
4. And you all wanted to know the answer to Roman inflation in the third century, didn't you? Matt Yglesias has it.
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Torture Party GOP Isn't Obama's Fault
Andrew Cohen today takes Barack Obama to task for failing to hold people responsible for torture during the George W. Bush administration, which I think is correct, and assigns some blame to Obama for the GOP pro-torture position, which I think is too strong.
Cohen believes that Obama should have convened a Truth Commission back in 2009. I agree. It would be a very good thing to get on the record, as clearly as possible, whatever intelligence gains -- and deficits -- resulted from torture during the Bush years. I'm fairly confident that torture was a net loss just in its immediate, direct effects, and more so if the indirect effects of damaging US prestige are counted, but I'd be more confident about that if we had a full accounting. (For related points, see Adam Serwer today).
But realistically, there is exactly zero chance that any Truth Commission could change the overwhelming fact that the former Republican Vice President of the United States is going to be out there advocating for torture, and that without something to trump that the odds are very high that a whole lot of other GOP opinion leaders will chose Cheney's position over Barack Obama's, at least as long as Obama is in the Oval Office.
A new Republican president would instantly marginalize Cheney, and if that president chose to publicly re-assert the traditional American opposition to torture then there's a good chance that favoring torture would rapidly become a fringe position again. Until that point, there really is only person who has an excellent chance of marginalizing Cheney and Cheneyism: George W. Bush. If Mr. War On Terror was to declare that torture didn't work, and that it was all a horrible but well-intentioned mistake, I think there's a pretty good chance that most GOP politicians would go along.
That was the thinking, I assume, behind Andrew Sullivan's wonderful open letter to Bush last year; it's the thinking behind my suggestions that Obama issue a blanket pardon for Bush-era torturers, because that might change the incentives for Bush. But in both cases there's really nothing that Obama can do to force the issue, just as there's nothing that Obama can do to get Dick Cheney himself to accept the traditional consensus view. Andrew Cohen should recall that there was a Congressional committee on Iran-Contra, and it totally failed to get Republicans to accept the facts of the case, primarily because the Republicans on the committee -- led by none other than Dick Cheney -- dissented. And while Cohen argues that the 9/11 Commission put conspiracy theories about that event in fringe territory, I don't think that's right, either. Those conspiracy theories were always on the fringe, but the 9/11 Commission did nothing to quiet those conservatives who believed, for example, that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks.
So, yes, blame Obama for not addressing an issue he should have addressed, but do remember that controlling what the opposition says and believes is far beyond the powers of the presidency.
Cohen believes that Obama should have convened a Truth Commission back in 2009. I agree. It would be a very good thing to get on the record, as clearly as possible, whatever intelligence gains -- and deficits -- resulted from torture during the Bush years. I'm fairly confident that torture was a net loss just in its immediate, direct effects, and more so if the indirect effects of damaging US prestige are counted, but I'd be more confident about that if we had a full accounting. (For related points, see Adam Serwer today).
But realistically, there is exactly zero chance that any Truth Commission could change the overwhelming fact that the former Republican Vice President of the United States is going to be out there advocating for torture, and that without something to trump that the odds are very high that a whole lot of other GOP opinion leaders will chose Cheney's position over Barack Obama's, at least as long as Obama is in the Oval Office.
A new Republican president would instantly marginalize Cheney, and if that president chose to publicly re-assert the traditional American opposition to torture then there's a good chance that favoring torture would rapidly become a fringe position again. Until that point, there really is only person who has an excellent chance of marginalizing Cheney and Cheneyism: George W. Bush. If Mr. War On Terror was to declare that torture didn't work, and that it was all a horrible but well-intentioned mistake, I think there's a pretty good chance that most GOP politicians would go along.
That was the thinking, I assume, behind Andrew Sullivan's wonderful open letter to Bush last year; it's the thinking behind my suggestions that Obama issue a blanket pardon for Bush-era torturers, because that might change the incentives for Bush. But in both cases there's really nothing that Obama can do to force the issue, just as there's nothing that Obama can do to get Dick Cheney himself to accept the traditional consensus view. Andrew Cohen should recall that there was a Congressional committee on Iran-Contra, and it totally failed to get Republicans to accept the facts of the case, primarily because the Republicans on the committee -- led by none other than Dick Cheney -- dissented. And while Cohen argues that the 9/11 Commission put conspiracy theories about that event in fringe territory, I don't think that's right, either. Those conspiracy theories were always on the fringe, but the 9/11 Commission did nothing to quiet those conservatives who believed, for example, that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks.
So, yes, blame Obama for not addressing an issue he should have addressed, but do remember that controlling what the opposition says and believes is far beyond the powers of the presidency.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Bush Administration Follies (or not?)
My favorite paragraph from the last week:
That's from the NYT Magazine front-page scare story about biological weapons last Sunday, and it reminds me of a continuing non-story, or sort-of-story, that I've remarked on before: the question of just how poorly the government operated in the Bush years. As I've said, I expected quite a few stories to emerge of massive incompetence in multiple agencies. Why? BecauseI suspected that Bush didn't do very much management of the bureaucracy, and Congressional oversight basically collapsed.
So what do we have? The big ones: the occupation of Iraq, detention/torture, and generally the management of Gitmo. I think I'd count the SEC -- not the failure of the law to keep up with Wall Street, but the failure of the agency to carry out what it was charged to do. That agency that was supposed to regulate drilling in the Gulf...the Minerals Management Service, right?
What else? I'm not interested here in poor policy choices; I'm interested in dysfunctional agencies who carried out policy poorly, whatever that policy might have been.
I think, overall, that my expectation that there would be lots of awful-sounding stuff uncovered has turned out to be wrong. Most notably, I'm not aware of cases of fraud and corruption, such as those that marked the Reagan Administration, which was pretty much the basis for my expectations.
But overall, I'm just not sure (and I'm not at all sure that the paragraph I started this post with is actually an example of agency dysfunction; it might be, but mostly it just reminded me of the topic). What do people think? I'm not really aware of any systematic look at this sort of question (I'd be interested to hear what Matthew Dickinson thinks about it). My general sense is that the early Bush administration had above-average personnel in the White House staff, but a far below average president and a weirdly destructive wild card in the VP slot...I'd compare it with a Clinton administration that started out with unusually below-average WH personnel but improved dramatically over time, or an Obama administration that started with a pretty good WH staff but a president who has at times seemed (from what we know so far, which could be very incomplete) to pay a lot more attention to the legislative than the administrative side of the job. I'm wondering, however, whether my impression is correct.
From the outset, the choice of VaxGen proved controversial. The company had never produced a drug before, it had been delisted from Nasdaq a few months earlier for failure to file timely financial statements and it was embroiled in an ethical dispute in Thailand over human testing of another drug. But VaxGen did have certain advantages, not least that it had been working on a new anthrax vaccine for two years already, financed by $100 million from Fauci’s N.I.A.I.D.Yeah, I guess that would make it controversial.
That's from the NYT Magazine front-page scare story about biological weapons last Sunday, and it reminds me of a continuing non-story, or sort-of-story, that I've remarked on before: the question of just how poorly the government operated in the Bush years. As I've said, I expected quite a few stories to emerge of massive incompetence in multiple agencies. Why? BecauseI suspected that Bush didn't do very much management of the bureaucracy, and Congressional oversight basically collapsed.
So what do we have? The big ones: the occupation of Iraq, detention/torture, and generally the management of Gitmo. I think I'd count the SEC -- not the failure of the law to keep up with Wall Street, but the failure of the agency to carry out what it was charged to do. That agency that was supposed to regulate drilling in the Gulf...the Minerals Management Service, right?
What else? I'm not interested here in poor policy choices; I'm interested in dysfunctional agencies who carried out policy poorly, whatever that policy might have been.
I think, overall, that my expectation that there would be lots of awful-sounding stuff uncovered has turned out to be wrong. Most notably, I'm not aware of cases of fraud and corruption, such as those that marked the Reagan Administration, which was pretty much the basis for my expectations.
But overall, I'm just not sure (and I'm not at all sure that the paragraph I started this post with is actually an example of agency dysfunction; it might be, but mostly it just reminded me of the topic). What do people think? I'm not really aware of any systematic look at this sort of question (I'd be interested to hear what Matthew Dickinson thinks about it). My general sense is that the early Bush administration had above-average personnel in the White House staff, but a far below average president and a weirdly destructive wild card in the VP slot...I'd compare it with a Clinton administration that started out with unusually below-average WH personnel but improved dramatically over time, or an Obama administration that started with a pretty good WH staff but a president who has at times seemed (from what we know so far, which could be very incomplete) to pay a lot more attention to the legislative than the administrative side of the job. I'm wondering, however, whether my impression is correct.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Presidenting and Rick Perry
I took a fair amount of grief, or at least puzzlement, in comments (and on twitter) for saying earlier today that Republicans could do a lot worse than Rick Perry (and Mitt Romney, but the comments were all about Perry) and the either would likely be "much better presidents" than George W. Bush. Since I've been asked for an explanation, I'll give one.
Basically, when thinking about who would make a good president, I want to put policy positions to the side. Obviously, a good Republican president is going to pursue and eventually enact quite different policies than a good Democratic president, and I certainly have preferences about those policies. But what I'm talking about in the Perry/Romney/Bush comment, and what I generally talk about here, is about their ability to president (or, how good they are at presidenting).
So what does it take to be good at that, and why do I think Rick Perry would probably be better than Bush? Well, mostly it starts with how low the bar is: Bush, in my view, really was astonishingly bad at it. So that raises the question of what Bush didn't have. And what I've argued is that it comes down to three things: experience in governing; basic interesting in government and public affairs; and, perhaps the trickiest one, ambition. Bush, I've argued (see here and here) just didn't have those things, with terrible consequences.
Rick Perry? He's a career politician who, as far as I can tell, is as wildly ambitious as any of them. He wants to be President of the United States not because he sobered up one day and decided to go into his dad's business, but because as a career pol it's the top of his profession. That's good; he's a lot less likely than Bush was to give up on the job, or not care what voters thing. He -- like Romney -- appears to have little problem adjusting his positions in order to secure political goals. I like that too; true believers worry me a lot, even if I agree with their policy positions. I don't know that he's been great at governing, but at least he won't be dealing for the first time with an aide withholding information in order to avoid looking bad, or a bureaucrat fighting against him by leaking stuff to the press. He should know that he can't automatically trust people, even close allies he has appointed to their positions.
Would he be particularly good at presidenting?* I don't have enough information to guess at that, but I'm not really aware of any serious positive signs. I do have some concerns about any Republican at this point, not because of issue positions but just because the party is so dysfunctional that I suspect there are unusual challenges to being a GOP president. But other than that, I don't really see any particular reason going in to be alarmed about Perry.
*You don't like my verbification? Sorry, but I'm keeping this one.
Basically, when thinking about who would make a good president, I want to put policy positions to the side. Obviously, a good Republican president is going to pursue and eventually enact quite different policies than a good Democratic president, and I certainly have preferences about those policies. But what I'm talking about in the Perry/Romney/Bush comment, and what I generally talk about here, is about their ability to president (or, how good they are at presidenting).
So what does it take to be good at that, and why do I think Rick Perry would probably be better than Bush? Well, mostly it starts with how low the bar is: Bush, in my view, really was astonishingly bad at it. So that raises the question of what Bush didn't have. And what I've argued is that it comes down to three things: experience in governing; basic interesting in government and public affairs; and, perhaps the trickiest one, ambition. Bush, I've argued (see here and here) just didn't have those things, with terrible consequences.
Rick Perry? He's a career politician who, as far as I can tell, is as wildly ambitious as any of them. He wants to be President of the United States not because he sobered up one day and decided to go into his dad's business, but because as a career pol it's the top of his profession. That's good; he's a lot less likely than Bush was to give up on the job, or not care what voters thing. He -- like Romney -- appears to have little problem adjusting his positions in order to secure political goals. I like that too; true believers worry me a lot, even if I agree with their policy positions. I don't know that he's been great at governing, but at least he won't be dealing for the first time with an aide withholding information in order to avoid looking bad, or a bureaucrat fighting against him by leaking stuff to the press. He should know that he can't automatically trust people, even close allies he has appointed to their positions.
Would he be particularly good at presidenting?* I don't have enough information to guess at that, but I'm not really aware of any serious positive signs. I do have some concerns about any Republican at this point, not because of issue positions but just because the party is so dysfunctional that I suspect there are unusual challenges to being a GOP president. But other than that, I don't really see any particular reason going in to be alarmed about Perry.
*You don't like my verbification? Sorry, but I'm keeping this one.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Cheney and Presidential Weakness
Dick Cheney wasn't an incompetent vice president because he was a stupid man. He, and the president who listened to him far too much for far too long, were incompetent -- on Iraq, on detention, on other things -- because Cheney believed in a flawed theory of presidential power.
That's the takeaway from one of the best things I've read in some time, Jack Goldsmith's article in the NYT Magazine this past weekend, well-titled as "How Dick Cheney Reined in Presidential Power." Goldsmith begins by recapping the famous hospital confrontation involving John Ashcroft, James Comey, himself (of Justice's OLC), and Andy Card and Alberto Gonzalez. He goes on to quite properly set it in the context of a strategy of presidential power based on secrecy and White House dictatorial control:
Dick Cheney is a good example of all of this exactly because his prior reputation would never have led people to guess that he'd make such a habit of botching things. And yet, botch things he did, over and over. Not because he didn't understand policy, but because he -- and by extension, George W. Bush -- refused to accept the limitations on the presidency imposed by the Constitutional system of institutions. And as Cheney shows and as Goldsmith says, the consequences are predictable: poor policy execution, followed by a loss of presidential power.
Just to be clear: the alternative to Cheneyism isn't passivity. Presidents should fight hard for things, and they should be held accountable when they don't -- although part of what it means to need to bargain to get things done is that some presidential preferences will no doubt fall when the president learns from institutional resistance. What they shouldn't do, however, is to react to that resistance with Constitutionally suspect end runs, whether it's to avoid Congress or to avoid legitimate portions of the executive branch. Whatever one thinks of the ethics of it all, the bottom line remains that it just doesn't work.
That's the takeaway from one of the best things I've read in some time, Jack Goldsmith's article in the NYT Magazine this past weekend, well-titled as "How Dick Cheney Reined in Presidential Power." Goldsmith begins by recapping the famous hospital confrontation involving John Ashcroft, James Comey, himself (of Justice's OLC), and Andy Card and Alberto Gonzalez. He goes on to quite properly set it in the context of a strategy of presidential power based on secrecy and White House dictatorial control:
Unilateralism in secret is sometimes necessary at the height of a crisis, and Cheneyism was effective in the short run. But it is disastrous over the medium and long term. The president cannot accomplish much over time without the assistance of his bureaucracy and the other institutions of government. And he cannot garner that assistance through mere commands. He must instead convince these institutions that his policies are good and lawful ones that they should support.That's exactly the Neustadtian point that you'll hear me making over and over (full argument here): that circumventing the system is possible in the short run, but then yields entirely predictable disaster. Goldsmith continues:
Cheney...complains about pesky government lawyers, a weak-kneed Congress, activist justices and a treasonous press that exposed, rejected or changed nearly all of the Bush counterterrorism policies. What he does not say is that his insistence on circumventing these institutions was often responsible for their blowback. The surveillance confrontation resulted when Justice Department lawyers discovered that prior legal opinions were filled with factual and legal errors caused by an absence of deliberation about the complicated program. And damaging leaks about the surveillance program resulted from the perception of illegitimacy inside the government caused by Cheney’s corner-cutting unilateralism.You may wonder why I'm so obsessed with Watergate, but this is points to one of the main, critical, themes. I mean, Watergate is a great story with great characters and all, but it also reveals much about what presidential power really is and how it works and doesn't work. For example, what Goldsmith is talking about here is what I think of as the Hunt/Liddy problem: why were the president's men during Watergate such inept losers? Was it bad luck (that is, from Nixon's point of view)? Poor management skills? I believe it was instead something systematic. When the president wants to do something, and the system resists, and he chooses to plunge ahead anyway by doing it essentially behind the back of the system...well, then you get Hunt and Liddy, and Ollie North, and "poor legal opinions...filled with factual and legal errors caused by an absence of deliberation about the complicated programs." And: Colin Powell's speech to the UN. And: not just the illegality of torture and Gitmo, but the rank incompetence that we've seen over and over.
Dick Cheney is a good example of all of this exactly because his prior reputation would never have led people to guess that he'd make such a habit of botching things. And yet, botch things he did, over and over. Not because he didn't understand policy, but because he -- and by extension, George W. Bush -- refused to accept the limitations on the presidency imposed by the Constitutional system of institutions. And as Cheney shows and as Goldsmith says, the consequences are predictable: poor policy execution, followed by a loss of presidential power.
Just to be clear: the alternative to Cheneyism isn't passivity. Presidents should fight hard for things, and they should be held accountable when they don't -- although part of what it means to need to bargain to get things done is that some presidential preferences will no doubt fall when the president learns from institutional resistance. What they shouldn't do, however, is to react to that resistance with Constitutionally suspect end runs, whether it's to avoid Congress or to avoid legitimate portions of the executive branch. Whatever one thinks of the ethics of it all, the bottom line remains that it just doesn't work.
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