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Learning To Love Bush’s Brain

Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Oct. 23, 2000, at 6:16 PM ET

Smart Republicans have passed through three distinct phases of progressive rationalization about George W. Bush's brainpower. Phase One was: He isn't dumb. This phase began during Dubya's first term as governor in Texas, when his surprise victory over Ann Richards and his growing reputation as an effective moderate made the concept of a quietly smart Dubya an easy sell to the mainstream media. "Bush is young (51), he's smart and he's got the Name," Newsweek's "Periscope" column enthused at the end of 1997. Phase Two was: He's dumb, but it doesn't matter. This phase was kicked off by Dubya's failure to pass a TV reporter's foreign policy pop quiz. "The press just never got the point, which is that people look for leadership and character and principles and they don't expect complete mastery of every detail," Bush's then-spokesman, David Beckwith, was quoted saying in the July, 19, 1999, issue of U.S. News & World Report. Phase Two proved a harder sell than Phase One, as evidenced by the headline U.S. News put on that story: "Is It Wrong To Call Him George Dumbya Bush?"

[Correction, 8/24: Phase Two actually began before the pop quiz, which occurred four months after Beckwith made his remarks to U.S. News.]

Now Robert Bartley, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, has kicked off Phase Three. What is Phase Three? Read this passage from Bartley's Oct. 23 "Thinking Things Over" column, "The Question of Competency," where he invokes the memory of Ronald Reagan:

The Gipper was cut from a different cloth. "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance," he once quipped. In cocktail party chatter Clark Clifford, a Beltway doyen before the BCCI scandal, dismissed the president as "an amiable dunce." His biographer Lou Cannon sums up, "Reagan both began and ended his presidency as a popular leader who essentially pleaded no contest to the accusation that he failed to mind the store."

Yet somehow President Reagan resolved the economic malaise of the 1970s, set off an economic boom, restored the nation's spirit and won the Cold War. Because he didn't talk like a policy wonk, his detractors attribute his success to luck and historical inevitability. The secret is that precisely because he refused to get bogged down in detail, he was able to get the big things right. In the executive how-to manuals they call this "focus."



Phase Three, then, is: He's dumb, and that's good!

Like Reagan, Bartley argues, in the debates Dubya "projected an image of someone who could keep his eye on the main issue, someone you might trust to short his way through the complications that bedevil serious decisions in either business or politics." Then, perhaps because he wants to avoid quoting Dubya's inelegant generalizations, or perhaps because he's channeling Dubya's management style, Bartley fails to give any examples.

The trouble with the Reagan-Dubya comparison is that Reagan was an ideologue, and Dubya is not. As a result, Bush is unlikely to be as responsive to Bartley and his fellow conservatives as Reagan was. Obviously, though, Bush will be more responsive than Gore. That's why Bartley is bothering to make this argument at all.

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Reader Comments from The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: We thought we had read every possible political view here at The Fray, but the posts featured below actually made points that were not over-familiar. Gold stars all round. There were other interesting comments on Bush and his brains here, here, here and here.]


The spirit of democracy would require a president of the same intelligence as the average citizen. So George Bush and the rest of the candidates are all too smart to meet this test. The spirit of a republic would require that a president be more intelligent than the average citizen. All the candidates meet this test.

--Thought Police

(To reply, click here.)


Enough of this nonsense. I'm tired of weak-minded Republicans talking about how dumb Reagan was, to boost the candidacy of George Bush. Reagan was a great orator--maybe he was little bit lazy, but damn, he had a sense of the world and direction that frankly George Bush doesn't have.

Ronald Reagan was focused on one thing. To end communism, the evil empire. He cast the world into archetypes: us and our allies, the good guys and soviets and their allies, the bad guys. As much as I think his Presidency did so much wrong and horrible, he did accomplish the one thing that he set out to do. End communism. Period.

It costs us trillions of dollars. We supported murderous despots in South East Asia and right-wing Dictators like Saddam Hussein because, damn, they weren't communists. This was true in South America as well, where we we're frankly keeping dictators in power who would slaughter their people only because they were fighting communist rebels who (however misguided) were only fighting the evil that they knew. Reagan was responsible for the Savings and Loans crisis where he deregulated everything so fast and so quick that we let people do things they shouldn't have done and the American public was left holding the bag. The problem was that Reagan wasn't into the details that so many bad things happened under his tenure (despite some good ones), but at the end of the day, he was responsible for some bad things that frankly I as an American have trouble reconciling. Still, he wasn't dumb, he was just lazy, mentally lazy.

George Bush is dumb and lazy. He has been provided with opportunities that most of us will never have and he has never taken the time to enrich himself. It is quite amazing frankly. This is all Machiavellian really. Republicans want one of their own in the White House. The fact that he is dumb and lazy is all the better, the better to control him, to manipulate him, to mold their world as they see fit. That's why the Republican Elite love him. The rest is rationalization.

--Mike

(To reply, click here.)


Let me begin by saying I am biased as a Bush supporter. Regarding Bush's intellectual capacity, I have 2 statements/observations:

1. I believe it takes a certain amount of brilliance to accomplish what he has done; In a single election season, Bush has made a credible case against the biggest knock on the Republican Party; that it is an intolerant, unkind, and greedy party run by religious conservatives and corporate interests.

2. He has managed to do so while maintaining the support of all conservative constituencies. (Much like Clinton did from the Left in 1992, and he was not referred to as 'dumb'.)

The thing which differentiates him from Clinton, in my opinion, is that he is sincere about his vision. His apparent lack of Gore-like political ambition is evidence of this. The Democratic leadership (and liberal media) are afraid to ask certain questions:

1) What if he really does want to include minorities in the Republican Party?

2) What if he refuses to bash Big Oil, Big Pharmaceuticals, and the Wealthy in general because they will all be needed as partners in any effort to rebuild the our society (and not just for their contributions)?

3) What if Compassionate Conservatism (The healing of our society through conservative policies) is for real?

If Bush's vision is for real, then he has done a brilliant job of repositioning an entire party. That takes brains.

--Matt Willoughby

(To reply, click here.)

(10/28)

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