All he wanted was a self-described "successful presidency". All along, in his unexamined ambition, lay the seeds of his failure.
George W. Bush had the formula worked out at least as early as 1999: "How to Have a Successful Presidency". Mickey Herskowitz, hired by the Bush 2000 campaign to ghost-write the candidate's autobiography, recalls Mr. Bush's thinking:
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade. If I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
"...the key...to being seen as a great leader..."
"I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
Mr. Bush focused on creating the political environment he felt most conducive to enacting his agenda. Getting the agenda enacted is the key to success; the particulars of the agenda itself not so much. So we see that defining an agenda for which he might build political consensus is less expedient than leveraging the "political capital"* of a Commander-in-Chief. And the end itself is "to be seen as a great leader". It is not necessary to be a great leader; what is paramount is being perceived as one. It's his legacy that matters: his "successful presidency".
During a 2002 debate in the Whitehouse about the purpose of a second round of tax cuts Mr. Bush briefly takes an interest in policy. The nature of his interest is quite telling.
The following is from the transcript of an interview conducted by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes with Ron Suskind promoting his book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill:
STAHL: (Voiceover) Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting, says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber-stamp the plan under discussion, a big new tax cut. But according to Suskind, the president was, perhaps, having second thoughts about cutting taxes again and was uncharacteristically engaged.
SUSKIND: He asks, 'Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's going to do it again.'
STAHL: The president himself says, 'But we already gave it to the rich people?'
SUSKIND: Yes, he says...
STAHL: 'Why are we going to do it again?'
SUSKIND: ...'Did we already--why are we doing it again? Why are we doing it again?' Now, his advisors, they say, 'Well, Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs.'
That's the standard response. And the president kind of goes, OK, that's their response. And then he comes back to it again. 'Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle? Won't people be able to say, 'You did it once, and then you did it twice and what was it good for?'
(Footage of Suskind; photo of Bush and Karl Rove)
STAHL: (Voiceover) But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.
SUSKIND: Karl Rove is saying to the president a kind of mantra, 'Stick to principle. Stick to principle.' And he says it over and over again.
STAHL: And he's saying, 'Stick and don't waver.'
SUSKIND: 'Don't waver.'
'...Won't people be able to say...what was it good for?'
All he wanted was to be "successful". Unfortunately for his ambition, Mr. Bush is a man who has never had to learn one of the most important and often bitter lessons of real-world achievement--the part about hard work, if you will: in order to be successful you've got to have a clear idea of the goal you are trying to achieve, be dogged in sacrificing to achieve as much of the goal as you possibly can, while remaining resolutely honest in assessing where your efforts are in relation to your objectives at all times. Mr. Bush, it seems, had a more simple view of success. Passing "his policies", whatever they might be, in a highly favorable political environment is the stuff of greatness. The policies themselves, what they achieve and how they connect to the lives of the governed never really enters into his calculations. Yet, in this one meeting at least, if only momentarily, he glimpses another way of connecting the dots. His concern however is only with what people will be able to say; what the impact, that is, will be upon his legacy. He apparently never questions the impact of his policies on anything other than his legacy, his "successful presidency".
Focusing on the results instead of the nuts and bolts of actual achievement, the hard work, ensures his failure. Mr. Bush was never interested in affecting positive change in the world. His only interest has been to have a successful presidency which boils pathetically down to having been perceived as successful. He lives in the future anterior tense: "I will have had a successful presidency." This is a place from which success itself can never be achieved.
What clearer picture can we have of Mr. Bush's experience of the present, of lived experience, versus his precious legacy, than the answer he gives to the German news magazine Bild when asked to name the "most wonderful moment" of his presidency, Mr. Bush had this to say:
"I don't know, it's hard to characterize the great moments. They've all been busy moments, by the way," Bush said, apparently trawling his memory for good times since 2001. "I would say the best moment was when I caught a 7-1/2-pound largemouth bass on my lake," he said eventually.
Even his fish stories lack ambition for genuine success. No largemouth bass weighing less than 15 pounds is worth talking about. Yet this experience, landing a half-pint fish, is the "most wonderful moment" of Mr. Bush's "successful presidency". Is it a temporal problem? "I catch a fish." "I will have had a successful presidency." There's nothing remarkable to Mr. Bush in the Presidency itself, no actual experiences to be had or savored, though he does find it to be very busy.
Given this, what chance was there that things should have turned out any differently? Despite all the damage he has done, and the growing tragedy his presidency is for the United States and indeed the community of nations, Mr. Bush has cast himself as a comic figure woefully out of place in this own life story. When he reflects on what his legacy will look like, if he can indeed have such an experience of himself in the present tense, he must in no small measure feel himself to be a very lonely and isolated man.
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* The irony has apparently been lost on our first CEO President, so intent on acquiring and then spending political capital, that capital generally refers to those resources that precisely are not spent.