Why Bush doesn't like homework
For George W., never much of a student, leadership means hearing
the options and deciding. Does it matter whether he can name the
leader of Pakistan?
By James Carney
November 8, 1999
Web posted at: 1:21 p.m. EST (1821 GMT)
George w. Bush knows the question is coming. He is sitting in the
back of a silver Ford Windstar minivan, his compact frame
unfurled across the bench seat, his left arm slung across the
backrest. He appears completely relaxed, but when the question
arrives--the one about whether he has the intellectual wherewithal
to be President and whether it bothers him that this issue keeps
being raised in the campaign--his body tenses. He turns his face
forward, his eyes narrow, and he gazes out the windshield at the
long road ahead. "You know," Bush says, his voice tinny but
measured, "I don't really mind people picking on me. I know what
I can do. I've never held myself out to be any great genius, but
I'm plenty smart. And I've got good common sense and good
instincts. And that's what people want in their leader."
Bush may be right about the American people. In 1992 voters threw
his father out of office in favor of a Democrat with a potent
intellect and an encyclopedic command of everything from gatt to
the gap in wages. But Americans learned that Bill Clinton has far
less command over his character, and that may have left them with
a yearning for a less complicated President. In Texas, Bush is
known as a skilled manager and a confident, crisp decision maker.
He has pursued, for the most part, simple, understandable policy
goals and has stuck to his agenda with remarkable discipline. But
on the national stage these past eight months, a competing image
of Bush has appeared--that of a cautious, staff-dependent
candidate, likable but lacking gravitas, who sounds out of his
depth on some of the most serious policy issues a President must
consider. Last week reporters pounced on the fact that he failed
an interviewer's pop quiz by not knowing the leaders of three out
of four world hot spots--Chechnya, India and Pakistan.* (He got
right the leader of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui.) But more troubling was
the fact that when exposed to questions from real voters about,
say, the impact of the Internet on rural America, Bush gets lost
in verbiage, as if struggling to put meaning behind words.
And yet the truth about the Texas Governor's brain is that he is
much smarter, at least in terms of raw, innate aptitude, than he
lets on. When his purloined college transcript from Yale was
published in the New Yorker last week, the news only confirmed
what we'd already expected and what Bush had once suggested--that
he had been a mediocre, C-average student. The surprise was that
Bush's sat scores, while not topping the charts, were better than
his grades. (Out of a possible top score of 800, Bush got 566 on
the verbal part of the test, 640 on the math.) It turns out Bush
was an underachiever. He didn't do well in class not because he
couldn't, but because he couldn't be bothered. The fear that
continues to fester about Bush--as we read about his periodic
foreign-policy gaffes and then hear him blithely assert that what
he doesn't know he can learn from his advisers--is that at 53 he
has the same cavalier attitude toward knowledge that he had at
21: he could learn what he needs to know, but he doesn't seem to
think it's worth his time.
Bush speaks convincingly about how important it is for a leader
to assemble a trustworthy cadre of advisers. And he argues that
there is no percentage, as Governor or as President, in trying to
master every subject or micromanage every decision. But as Bruce
Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in
Austin, says, "Bush is trying to turn his weakness into a virtue.
He's not a policy wonk, so he has to rely on people who are." And
there is a risk to that approach, adds Buchanan, who is an
admirer: "Bush's biggest weakness is that he might not be in a
position to discern the credibility of the options his advisers
lay out for him."
Bush's grasp of the details and nuance of some domestic-policy
issues--especially education--draws praise from experts around the
country. He can also talk substantively and passionately about
trade and immigration, two areas of "foreign policy" he
encountered as Governor of a state that shares a 900-mile border
with Mexico. Bush proved as much in Sioux City, Iowa, where he
took a vague question from the crowd to deliver a message of
compassion toward illegal immigrants. "I want to remind you of
something about immigration," Bush told his nearly all-white
audience. "Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande River.
There are moms and dads [who] have children in Mexico. And
they're hungry ... And they're going to come to try to find
work. If they pay $5 in one place and $50 in another place, and
they've got mouths to feed, they're going to come. It's a
powerful instinct. It's called being a mom and being a dad." He
then segued from immigration to an ardent defense of free trade,
arguing that only increased trade would improve the lives of
Mexicans enough to keep them in Mexico. It was an argument aimed
directly at the protectionist wing of Bush's party, and it was
not one that had been fed to him by advisers. His discourse
wasn't weighed down with policy detail, but it was an example of
what Bush can be at his best--genuine, articulate and
knowledgeable.
But on too many issues, especially those dealing with the wider
world of global affairs, Bush often sounds as if he's reading
from cue cards. When he ventures into international issues, his
unfamiliarity is palpable and not even his unshakable
self-confidence keeps him from avoiding mistakes. On a trip to
New Hampshire in September, Bush was cruising the streets and
storefronts of downtown Milford when he encountered a woman who
asked what he would do to "promote peace in the Middle East."
Bush didn't hesitate. "I want to stand by Israel," he declared.
"We're not gonna allow Israel to be pushed into the Red Sea." And
then he said, "There's something called the Arrow missile system,
which is an inter-ballistic, a short-range inter-ballistic
missile system that intercepts missiles coming from [elsewhere]."
Set aside that Bush replied to a question about the Middle East
peace process by talking up missile-defense systems at a time
when Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in sensitive
negotiations. And never mind the fact that he probably meant the
Mediterranean Sea, along which Israel has a lengthy border, and
not the Red Sea, on which it has but one port. There was
something else jarring about what Bush said. There is no such
thing as an "inter"-ballistic missile. These mistakes may seem
minor, but taken together they suggest that Bush is still under
water when grappling with foreign- and defense-policy basics.
A large part of Bush's attitude about knowledge comes from a
combative anti-intellectualism he developed as a Texas-bred Bush
attending Ivy League schools back East. Ever since George W. left
Houston to follow in his father's footsteps at Phillips Academy
in Andover, Mass., he has viewed with deep suspicion and disdain
the world of elite Northeastern academia and the people who
populate it. Bush was one of the most popular students in his
class at Yale. He mixed easily with the rich and the well bred,
but, according to classmates, he developed an intense dislike for
the class of Yalie he deemed "intellectual snobs." To Bush, the
epitome of the type was Strobe Talbott, the current Deputy
Secretary of State. Talbott (a distant relative of Bush) was one
of the class of 1968's most ambitious brains--editor of the Daily
News, Rhodes scholar roommate at Oxford to Bill Clinton, and
before joining the Clinton Administration, career journalist for
Time magazine, specializing in defense and foreign policies.
"Strobe was the kind of person George could not stand," says
Robert Birge, who was a member with Bush in Skull & Bones, a Yale
secret society. "He was appalled by people like Strobe. I don't
know why, but it was a real issue with him."
Bush won't talk about Talbott specifically, but he will say
"there is a certain East Coast attitude," an "intellectual
arrogance" that he "didn't find very appealing" at Yale or,
later, Harvard Business School. He suggests that the intellectual
elite at Yale dismissed him as inferior, that there was, in his
words, a "'You're from Texas, therefore' attitude" he resented.
"And I still believe," he says, "that just because somebody's got
an Ivy League title by their name doesn't make them smarter than
anybody else."
That hardly puts Bush, who holds two Ivy degrees, at odds with
mainstream America. But it may explain why he doesn't feel
compelled to absorb all the information in the briefing books
assembled for him by his own stable of heavily credentialed
experts. Besides, in Austin, at the statehouse and in campaign
headquarters on Congress Avenue, his distaste for the highbrow is
considered a virtue. In meetings with his speechwriter and press
staff, Bush reviews the words that will go out under his name
with a keen eye for the pompous and overwrought. When he spots a
sentence that wouldn't make sense to the average layman, Bush
peers over his half glasses and reads it back to his staff in a
haughty, mock-intellectual voice. "He's always asking,'How can we
say it more directly?'"says a top aide.
His leadership style is similarly direct. Although he insists
"the details are important," Bush freely admits that he prefers
one-page memos to bound treatises, oral briefings to long
meetings. When he is briefed, he doesn't just sit back and
listen. He engages his advisers, testing their logic and pressing
them to get to the heart of the matter. From the minute someone
starts talking about an issue, Bush is itching for a
recommendation. As Albert Hawkins, his state budget director,
says, "If you're going on too long, he tells you so." Says Bush:
"I like to hear someone enunciate a position, pro or con. Because
if someone cannot explain a position, that generally means they
don't understand the issue well enough to be part of the
decision-making process."
Bush won office in 1994 against a popular incumbent largely
because he was disciplined. Month after month during the
campaign, he kept repeating his four-point agenda. Once in
office, he took the same approach and applied it to governing. In
each legislative session, he set a few policy goals, outlined the
principles by which he would judge success and gave other people
the power to work out the details. "We can make decisions based
on his principles, which are very clear," says Vance MacMahon,
Bush's state policy director. "We don't have to run every
decision up the flagpole."
For all his ambivalence about his Ivy League experience, Bush
picked up his successful management skills at Harvard Business
School. That's where, according to classmate Peter Gebhard, the
future politician showed strength in classes dealing with "human
behavior in organizations." Early in his time there, Professor
Harry L. Hansen warned Bush and his fellow students that they
would be inundated with more work than they could handle. Hansen
had a higher purpose than assigning punishing amounts of work:
the real goal, he explained, was to force students to learn how
to separate what was important from what wasn't and then focus on
it.
Bush's ability to focus at the right time has yielded such
results as tort reform in Texas. The bill had been languishing in
the legislature in 1995. When state senator David Sibley, the
G.O.P. author of the legislation, went to see Bush to tell him it
was dead, Bush invited him to dinner at the Governor's mansion.
Until then, the Governor had kept his distance from legislative
machinations. That night he weighed in. With Sibley by his side,
Bush got on the phone with the Democratic Lieutenant Governor,
Bob Bullock, and in a matter of minutes hammered out a compromise
that saved the bill. Even though the deal angered some of Bush's
allies in the business community, he stuck by it. "He's like the
guy at the pool party who sort of walks up to the diving board
and does a double twist with a flip," Sibley says now. "He made
it look easy."
Is there such a thing as a wrenching dilemma for Bush? When asked
to name the toughest decisions he's made, he hesitates, as if he
can't think of any. "Well, the toughest decision was to run," he
says at first. He pauses again and then recalls two death-penalty
decisions, including his well-publicized refusal to grant a stay
of execution to Karla Faye Tucker, that are featured in his book
A Charge to Keep, which will be published next week. The next
tough call that comes to mind: "The decision to fire Bobby
Valentine" as manager of the Texas Rangers when Bush was
co-owner.
Bush supporters like to argue that in his governing style, and
his lack of interest in some policy details, the Governor
resembles Ronald Reagan. It's a comparison every G.O.P. candidate
wants for himself. But if Bush, with his different strengths and
weaknesses, resembles any past President, it is probably his
father, only in mirror image. The elder Bush, unlike his son,was
a foreign-policy expert. A former CIA director, U.N.
representative and ambassador to China, he is probably on a
first-name basis with more world leaders than George W. can name.
But the former President's blind spot was domestic affairs. He
wasn't much interested in social issues or education. When it
came to domestic policy, President Bush deferred to his expert
advisers, much as George W. does now on questions of foreign
affairs. That arm's-length behavior cost the father a second
term. A similar problem could cost the son a first.
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Cover Date: November 15, 1999
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