Presidents Behaving Badly
Ron Suskind is a great journalist, but this seems like a dubious distinction to me:
George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush’s part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues.
Can we imagine making the reverse claim? Abraham Lincoln was neither an intelligent nor a good man, but in his conduct as president he behaved wisely and morally. That’s not quite right, is it? Lincoln’s wisdom and morality were, rather, revealed by the way he conducted himself as President.
72 Responses to “Presidents Behaving Badly”
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October 5th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Are you serious?
I am not fan of the GOP and its leaders, but Suskind’s speculation does not logically lead to your reverse
claim.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Lincoln’s wisdom and morality were, rather, revealed by the way he conducted himself as President.
The attempts to say that Bush isn’t a stupid, immoral person, he just does stupid, immoral things reminds me of this passage from a blog called Real Live Preacher:
Many go to great lengths to explain how Bush is not “stupid” or “a bad man,” but at a certain point, they are drawing distinctions that don’t matter, because all we have is what’s in front of us.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Well, certainly there’s famous quote to the effect that FDR was not a first class intellect. Or we know Clinton was undisciplined in his personal life and prone to get angry with aids, but did not run the government that way. Or Grant was said to be a drunkard, but a great general; also he was said to be personally honest and died broke, yet his administration was corrupt. And we all know Nixon’s faults, yet he passed important bipartisan legislation and “went to China.”
So I don’t think the contrast between personal qualities and governance is quite as impossible as you imply.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I really don’t care if Bush is a “good” or a “bad” man. He was a very bad president. He was unqualified for office, and demonstrated incompetence at every turn. He wasn’t elected to be “saint-in-chief,” he was elected to uphold the Constitution of the US. He failed.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
John DE, the point of Matt’s post is that Bush’s personal flaws were central to the way he governed. At no point does he claim or imply that personal qualities are inseparable from method of governance.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
If a man acts stupidly and immorally, then for all practical purposes he is stupid and immoral. The possibility that he might feel bad about his actions is irrelevant to the world around him.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Joel (#4), I agree with you. Bush may be stupid, he may be immoral, but the bottom line is that as president he has been a disaster.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Bush is a smart, ethical man governing stupidly and immorally in the same sense that John McCain is an honorable and nonpartisan man running a dishonorable and divisive campaign. Not.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I agree with Matt, but I see where Suskind is coming from. I have never been able to muster of any personal hatred for Bush of the sort I have for most other conservative politicians, even though Bush by virtue of his position has done the most harm. I don’t think he proceeds out of malice–I don’t think there’s any important issue where in the company of his advisers and money men he’s laughing about what he told the country vs. what the Real Agenda is. This makes him profoundly dangerous, because he’s doubly deluded (in his substantive beliefs and in his conviction that he’s well-suited to govern, to the point where process controls are irrelevant), but I still think there’s some meaningful sense in which he’s not as horrible a person as McCain or Cheney or even second-tier figures like Chambliss or Romney.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I think what Suskind meant is that Bush went to Harvard and apparently has not cheated on Laura or been harsh to his daughters.
And he did sign the legislation for the national Do Not Call Registry.
He is, otherwise, a stupid and a bad man.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Obama has an interesting anecdote near the start of Audacity of Hope about getting along with and even being charmed by Bush in an informal setting, then seeing him turn into a fire-breathing demon during a policy meeting.
We don’t have a good term for that sort of character, but that’s what Bush is.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
You are what the back of your baseball card says you are.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Couldn’t this be said about virtually any strongman/dictator? Was Stalin laughing in private over his public statements? Most such leaders, I imagine, convince themselves of their own righteousness. Their actions have a purpose, but getting a laugh is not one of them.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Republicans feel that their cause is so just and good (keeping the evil of the left’s godless dependency making softiness at bay) that lying, ignoring the law, and the constitution is all OK.
This mindset is when you can tell that a movement is rotting. Electing Bush II was a symptom, going ga ga over Palin was evidence of a terminal disease.
Bush may or may not be immoral or stupid (I think he’s more lazy than anything), but he reigned over a party that demanded he be immoral and stupid. They consider it a virtue. Blaming Bush overlooks the fact the GOP promotes incompetence in government as a good thing.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I have a simple rule in life for defining people. You are what you do. It doesn’t work all the time and there are exceptions and all but I agree with the heart of Matt’s post.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I second Rich.
I feel Bush is a shallow and insecure person easily duped by people who know how to play on his malformed ego (eg Cheney). His actions are Oedipal, with a tinge of needing to prove his manliness.
I’ve known brilliant scientists with similar attributes so I think its presumptuous to assume he is “stupid”.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
It’s Sunday afternoon; I’m tempted to throw out some Vince Lombardi quotes. Or is that bush league?
October 5th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
My simple rule is the simplest. There are assholes and then
there are others. No need for any ideology or religion. If you are not an asshole, you will do fine.
If, on the other hand, someone is an asshole, there is a 95% probability that he
is a Republican.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Stupid is as stupid does. It does not matter how bright he really is, he just does not care.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I’m sure everyone posting on this thread would love to be defined by the things they do that others don’t like.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I think that Bush is both evil and stupid, but I think that as far as the general question goes, it’s more likely for someone in a hard job to seem stupider and eviller than he is, than for them to seem smarter and more benevolent than they are. By and large good outcomes in dangerous circumstances are a difficult accomplishment, whereas bad results can be attained by many sorts of bad luck, miscalculations, oversights, misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance, but if the results are bad enough evil and stupidity tend to be blamed.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
It is important for us on the left to acknowledge that George Bush is not a stupid person any more than Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh are stupid people. We on the left are susceptible to a kind of snobbery in which we assume that most people on the right, or most people outside the urban cultural belts, are not as smart as us. It’s morally wrong and leads us to under-estimate the tactical smarts of our opponents.
As Jacob Weisburg argued some time ago in Slate, George Bush is a smart person who made being ignorant a matter of moral principle. I’m not a moral philosopher, but I believe that Bush’s contempt for moral distinctions more complex than “the good guys” and the “bad guys” leads him into two kinds of immorality. First, Bush acts immorally because he refuses to recognize that actions may be immoral in themselves (torture, Guantanamo, rendition, smearing McCain, etc.) even though he views them as serving good purposes. Second, Bush acts immorally because he only considers his own intentions and does not consider the consequences of his actions. Bush may have been sincere in the moral mission to bring democracy to the Middle East, but his refusal to evaluate the consequences of his actions lead the enterprise into the realm of moral monstrosity.
Because of the enormous military and financial power at his disposal, Bush’s commitment to ignorance (and reflexive aggression) has made his presidency into an enormous exercise in immorality. But I think we mistake outselves if we view this as a matter of Bush being either “stupid” or simply “bad.”
October 5th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
# jamie Says:
October 5th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I’m sure everyone posting on this thread would love to be defined by the things they do that others don’t like.
I see no reason to believe that Jamie is a “bad” person, or even that this comment is indicative of him being “stupid” overall.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The reason this seems important is because for the better part of a decade, conservatives have claimed that the feelings of our leaders are more important than what they actually do.
For instance, when people say that Bush is a horrible leader because he sent soldiers to die on a mission he knew was false, conservatives respond by saying that Bush feels awful when soldiers die, so he is not horrible. Likewise, they believe his main failing in Katrina wasn’t his utter failure to prepare for or respond to the most widely predicted mass destructive event in the US, but that it seemed like he didn’t care enough about its victims.
It’s the flip side of the “Clinton was a bad president because he had an affair.”
The conservative focus on powerful people’s feelings is ridiculous. It’s the logic of the confessional applied to electoral politics. But any priest will tell you that even if god forgives you, that doesn’t mean you’re fit fir higher office.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
The Jesuits were famously accused of the dictum that the ends justify the means. Bush extended that to think if you’re gonna squarsh somebody to spread Democracy, there’s no reason not to make some mazuma along the way.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
John Quincy Adams was a mediocre or worse as president. Are you willing to argue John Quincy Adams was stupid?
This seems to be a problem of wording more than anything else. Maybe something along the lines, “smart men can have bad policies?”
October 5th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush’s part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous.
This was not ignorance? “Eliminating complexity”, “shutting out dissenting voices” and an “insular mind-set” is the cause (if not the very definition) of ignorance! How did an editor not catch that?
October 5th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Actually Matt, your reverse hypothetical (bad man, good president) does make sense. Plug in JFK instead of Lincoln as the example. From his Navy service through his presidency Kennedy demonstrated good judgment, grace under fire and a gift for leadership.
And yet, he was in his private life, a horrible person who treated women (above all, his wife) terribly. He was also in terrible health. If his medical records had been publicly available, there’s no way a man in his poor physical condition would be given the burdens of the office. Dr. Zebra’s Kennedy page is eye opening.
“From a medical standpoint, Kennedy was a mess. For example, there is the simple fact that Kennedy was hospitalized more than three dozen times in his life and given the last rites three times”.
http://www.doctorzebra.com/Prez/g35.htm
October 5th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I happen to think Susskind is right – but it’s irrelevant. G.W. Bush has implemented monstrously evil policies. Sure, Cheney and the neocons manipulated a callow despot – but that doesn’t excuse the horrors he’s brought about. On his own -Hitler was kind to animals and unlike W – was a smart and interesting guy. Probably fifty times the guy Rush Limbaugh is, and a genuine war hero to boot. But, as the Fuhrer – look what the weasel dick did.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Quite simply, in the words of Scott Fitzgerald:
“Action is character.”
October 5th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
In the case of intelligence, there seems to be an asymmetry here. It is possible for an intelligent person to do stupid things by, say, not applying himself, or adopting an ideology that gets in the way of taking in information accurately.
By contrast, an unintelligent person can by luck do the same thing an intelligent person would, but it is hard to see them actually acting intelligently. In the same sense a strong person can act in the way that a weak person would by simply not using his strength. But a weak person cannot act like a strong person by using the strength that he lacks.
To apply it more directly to this case. Bush has always come off as not too bright, although it is probably more accurate to say that he is not bright given that he is in a position that generally is held by people of above average intelligence. But some of the misguided people pushing these idiotic proposals on him are not dumb, simply blinded by ideology. As many dumb policies as Bill Krystal has had to shill for, there is no reason to think he is actually an idiot.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Why not let the people who personally interact with Bush decide if he’s stupid and/ or bad?
The rest of us should take comfort in the brilliance of his oratory and his exemplary conduct of his administration.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
This all goes back to the idea of the president as a “regular guy”, not someone exceptional. So instead of focussing and demanding exceptional public performance, everyone gets wrapped up in private behavior. So what if GW Bush is a nice, smart guy, faithful to his wife, blah, blah? He’s is a terrible president. He has not exhibited the public performance that anyone should expect of a president. We can look at his public performance in business – miserable. His public performance as governor of TX was stage-managed by others and some achievements turned out to be shams (NCLB).
October 5th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Just arrive on Earth, did you?
October 5th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I think I know what you mean. When Obama was sworn in to the Senate, Bush told him something like “now that you’re here, they’re gonna try to get ya”. Obama naively took that as a good-natured warning. I took it as an asshole trying to ruin a good man’s crowning moment.
Bush went to the best schools in the world but doesn’t know the difference between Switzerland and Sweden. When confronted with a situation beyond his knowledge (which has happened too many times to count) rather than use any sort of native wit to think his way out he freezes like a deer in headlights, then blusters and sputters until the clock runs out.
He is the only man to become president with a criminal record. He blew up animals with firecrackers as a child. An admitted drug addict and alcoholic, he yet advocates the strongest possible penalties for other people with those problems. Compare attributes Bush is known to have to those of a sociopath; anti-social personalities even like lots of vacations, for goodness sake.
He is stupid, he is immoral, and anyone who tries to obscure this is, if only in a small way, in collusion with his vast litany of misdeeds.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Suskind is only half-right. You misunderestimate George W. Bush if you think him dumb. He may be shallow, craven, and petty. He may be arrogant, petulant and resentful. He may be slothful, ignorant and incurious. But he sure isn’t dumb.
As for being “a good man;” good men are not pricks.
To put it quite another way, does anyone on earth consider George W. Bush to be a mensch?
October 5th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
The reminds me of the arguments that Bush and his policies are not truly “conservative”. But Bush considers himself a conservative. He ruled for 6 of his 8 years with control of all branches of the federal government, and conservatives of all kinds voted for him twice. So what he accomplished (or ruined) is truly what constitutes “conservatism”. You are what your record says you are.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Can we imagine making the reverse claim? Abraham Lincoln was neither an intelligent nor a good man, but in his conduct as president he behaved wisely and morally. That’s not quite right, is it?
Oh, I don’t think that’s so obviously wrong. Many people consider Lincoln a racist because he supposedly made racist statements; he should still get credit for leading to the abolition of slavery. What matters is what he actually did, not what was in his heart. I don’t see anything weird about any of this (which isn’t to say I agree with these claims about Lincoln or Bush)
October 5th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Couldn’t you have a president who had no moral sense, who acted to gain power and in the process managed to do good things by coincidence. It seems to me that this is the kind of thing our founders were counting on. My sense is that Bush is very smart, but he devoted all his efforts to politics and never really bothered to actually govern. This eventually was bad politics, but hey he got reelected.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Oh, come on. You guys are smarter than this. A practicing serious mainstream journalist — as opposed to an investigative/opinion journo like Matthew Yglesias — isn’t allowed to say “George Bush is an intellectual lightweight with loose morals.” But a journalist is allowed to write “George Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But…” The reader gets the impression clearly: he’s not stupid or bad, but take those adjectives down one notch and that’s probably what this journalist thinks he is.
Try this on for size: “Barack Obama is not a traitor. But…” That’s how it works.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Yglesias has no concept of logical thinking, given his degree in philosophy, where logical thinking is not rewarded.
Suskind is correct, if you understand his limitations as well. To him, Bush is not stupid or bad both because he can’t afford to believe that and can’t afford to say that in public.
And in fact, Bush isn’t stupid in the sense of being a moron like, well, Palin or McCain. Bush’s malapropisms, for example, result from his contempt of everyone other than him rather than stupidity.
What is worse than being stupid, however, is that he deliberately did what he did for reasons of greed, power lust, and maliciousness. Stupidity had nothing to do with it.
That definitely qualifies Bush as “bad”, in most people’s morality-saturated primate minds. He qualifies as “incorrect” – the Transhuman equivalent of “bad”, without any “moral” aspersions – in my mind. That his actions end up doing damage to the species and really does nothing to extend his lifespan also counts as “stupid” in my mind – but that has nothing to do with his actual level of functional intelligence which is on a par with most of the morons this species has.
And this is what Suskind can’t honestly admit to himself – that the President of the United States is no less a criminal than a Mafia thug – and has the same attitude to boot.
Matt also can’t bring himself to admit that the US state is being run as a criminal enterprise, either. He has to keep believing for reasons of cognitive dissonance that somehow if we just got the right asshole in charge – like this nitwit Obama, who wants to inflame wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran because of HIS stupidity – everything would work out.
In other words, Matt’s a moron as much or more than Bush or Obama are.
As Obi-Wan said, “Who’s the more fool – the fool or the fool who follows him?”
October 5th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
This seems like as good a time as any to resurrect one of my favorite essays by the oft-maligned Jon chait, “Mad About You:”
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=PLC0BZ4uv8VdFvbJQbMx5G%3D%3D
October 6th, 2008 at 12:40 am
“The ends justify the means” is bad enough, but Bush takes it a cut lower – “The ends would have justified the means had we achieved them, so we’re good.”
October 6th, 2008 at 2:11 am
As unconscionable, greedy, arrogant, callous, vindictive, destructive, and ruthless as Bush is, it’s a good thing he’s not any smarter than he is.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Losers happen. The more interesting question is why 20% or so of the American electorate still think that Dubya is doing a good job.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Can we imagine making the reverse claim? Abraham Lincoln was neither an intelligent nor a good man, but in his conduct as president he behaved wisely and morally.
I’ll ignore the wider issues for a moment, but it seems clear to me that:
a.) It’s far easier to be intelligent and behave stupidly, than to be stupid and behave intelligently.
b.) It is easier for a “good man” to stray from the path of morality, than it is for a “bad man” to become a moral person.
At what point the “good man” becomes a “bad man” is certainly open to argument.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:15 am
George W. Bush isn’t stupid. He’s shallow. Until roughly the age of 40 he was a drunk-off-his-ass jackoff who never experienced the sort of character-building and wisdom-bestowing moments men like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan went through. You can certainly credit President Bush with pulling himself together later in life, but nothing can make up for those voids in emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor that result from being a drunk-off-your-ass jackoff until the age of 40.
Mike
October 6th, 2008 at 10:27 am
At what point the “good man” becomes a “bad man” is certainly open to argument.
Points #1 and #2 are good observations, novakant, but I never saw anything in Bush’s biography to make me think he started out as a “good man.” Suskind and many others seem to be using the terms “good” and “moral” as shorthand for “has not had any extramarital affairs,” and so the themes of his failures tend to revolve around, “how could this have happened? he was such a devoted family man!” which is an observation that makes absolutely no sense to me.
October 6th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Lincoln was intelligent and moral, but his most appealing characteristic to me was his absolute belief in the superiority of reason to emotion. His summaries to juries focused on summarizing the facts of a case with a few logical arguments and not emotional appeals; he rarely displayed personal anger and apart from some ill-advised conspiracy arguments in his debates with Stephen Douglas his political appeals tended to shoot for the heads of voters rather than their hearts.
This emphasis on calm deliberation probably helped him grow as a president and a person. Lincoln probably harbored feelings of white superiority throughout his life, but they were never particularly important to him and he never matched Douglas for vicious racism. Both Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth said he spoke to them as individuals and not as inferiors. His political thinking changed as well; in 1858 he expressed a belief that blacks should not vote or serve on juries; by 1865 he believed in at least a limited right to black suffrage, and it’s probable Lincoln would have gone further had he lived. Score one for deliberation.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
A President can certainly be ineffective for reasons other than being stupid or bad. Carter was ineffective in many areas for many reasons, without being either stupid or bad. OTOH, with the Middle East in turmoil, after multiple intifadas, fights in Lebanon, etc., the Camp David peace accord still stands.
Bush has been effective in pursuit of a wide range of actions, and it is the malignant consequences of those actions that is the problem.
The argument for Bush not being bad is that he was too stupid to understand what he was doing. He is either stupid enough that he is not bad, or not that stupid, and he is bad.
November 30th, 2008 at 7:44 am
My people did a great thing Tuesday. We elected Barack Obama president. We overcame the usual and unusual smear and fear campaign. We overcame
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