What Bush Needs

Paul Begala writes

Mr. Bush would do well to augment his current staff, a C-Team if ever there was one, with some stronger characters. But to read the Bush-Miers correspondence is to gain a disturbing insight into Mr. Bush's personality: he likes having his ass kissed. Ms. Miers' cards and letters to the then-Governor of Texas belong in the Brown-Nosers Hall of Fame. You can be sure the younger and less experienced Bush White House aides are even more obsequious. The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups.

Certainly, the president, any president, needs a staff that will support him but also will stand up to him when he's wrong. He doesn't have this, and it's largely his own fault. Time magazine wrote,

Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term.

Newsweek went further:

“It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS,” Evan Thomas wrote in Newsweek on September 19. Thomas talked to “several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president.”

Thomas went on to report “Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him…Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.”

(emphasis mine) When the president makes it clear he does not want to hear bad news, his underlings are not likely to bring it to him.

But Begala writes, "When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him." I cannot agree. This refusal to listen to bad or contrary information is nothing new. It has been one of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency. From the beginning, CIA analysts looking at intelligence data regarding Iraq "worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." I wrote before:

Analysts at CIA are pursuing a career. With such pursuits come a desire for attention from on high, for promotions, etc. Against such a backdrop, analysts are not likely to draw conclusions deviating from the expected results. Not only will those analysts not get attention from supervisors and upper management for their work, they would actually be frowned on. When no one wants to hear anything other than the expected result, writing unacceptable conclusions could well damage one's career at CIA. As the LA Times reports, "And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs." So, the desire for career advancement and security would pressure the analysts to conclude what was expected.

This trait of not listening to dissent, and punishing those who say things the president doesn't want to hear is what got us into Iraq. Now, when things are going so badly for him, the president is paying the price for his own stubbornness and insularity.