There’s actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. Over the past eight years, I have interviewed President Bush for nearly 11 hours, spent hundreds of hours with his administration’s key players and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and notes. That produced four books, totaling 1,727 pages, that amount to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, and there are plenty of morals to the story. Presidents live in the unfinished business of their predecessors, and Bush casts a giant shadow on the Obama presidency: two incomplete wars and a monumental financial and economic crisis. Here are 10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience.
I’ve reattached to Bob Woodward recently. I had a period where I sort of wore out with him. He was too taken with himself and self promoting for my tastes, I thought to myself. But, if I had busted the Watergate story, I’d be pretty taken with myself too. What was really bothering me was something else. He was too forgiving of Bush and Cheney. He’s gotten over that, and I like him again. I’m easy to please.
He’s written this piece in a positive way. That’s a good technique. More ‘bang for the buck,’ as people say these days. But he’s making nice. This is a list of things that anyone who is any kind of leader ought to just know before they ever get into a position of leadership. They’re things you learn by following. Bush never followed. The simple truth is that George W. Bush is not a leader. He approached his job as President as if the important things were his decisions. He even said it. He was "the decider." And once he "decider-ed," he never turned back.
Needless to say, leading isn’t about "deciding." In this legacy tour of his, he talks endlessly about his decisions. He misses the point entirely that we’re not asking him about that. We’re asking him why he didn’t lead us better and why he didn’t change his mind when his decisions didn’t work. But he doesn’t know what we’re talking about, nor does his trusty sidekick who gives us 2001 answers to 2008-2009 questions. Neither of them understand that an effective leader assembles the best and brightest, then puts them together as a team, then helps them come to consensus, only over-riding that consensus on the occasions where they’ve obviously gone awry. A good leader often doesn’t know what’s right, but has a keen sense of what’s wrong. That requires having a broad idea of what’s going on. Bush didn’t go fact gathering himself, and often was kept out of the loop altogether – probably because he was not really much of a resource.
In a recent interview, Woodward said that Bush was impatient and didn’t do his homework. That sounds right. He wanted to get the decision out of the way, so he could go back to biking, brush clearing, and clowning around. And that’s what he did. When confronted about the consequences of his decisions, he invariably starts talking about why he made the decision in the first place – bagging the focus of the question altogether, the consequences. As they say, "the proof is in the pudding." When asked about his regrets, it’s almost always about him not having the right information – "faulty intelligence. [I always want to answer, "Yeah, yours!"].
He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses — and left troops in harm’s way on two fields of battle. He embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world’s champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.
Bush’s great hope is that Iraq in the years to come will emerge as a thriving pro-Western democracy — and offer some vindication for the misbegotten war that will always be associated with his name. (He has already done a masterful job of spinning his troop "surge" as a profound success – instead of a maneuver that has simply postponed the nearly inevitable paroxysms to come.) But even if he does ultimately have something to show for our incredible – and profoundly mismanaged — investment of blood and capital, it will never be enough.
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