American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut

American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs From The Gut

By David Michael Green

Created Aug 31 2007 - 10:03am

George W. Bush is actually one of the most educated of American presidents,

believe it or not.

That statement depends, of course, on a couple of whopping assumptions. Like

defining education formally, in terms of degrees received, and also on

ignoring what happened (and especially what didn't) along the way to the

sheepskins. But if you put aside those two monster caveats, Bush is actually

in the top tier of America's 43 presidents. Only a handful of them had

advanced degrees, and quite a few (up through as recently as Harry Truman)

had no college at all.

But, of course, the assumptions turn out to be crucial, and they illuminate

as clearly as one could ever imagine the difference between being smart and

being educated (or, better yet, being educated and having letters after your

name). By all accounts, including his own, Bush was both a lousy student,

and an arrogant smart-ass to boot. It's hard to imagine how he could have

received his Yale bachelor's degree or his Harvard MBA in the absence of his

name, his money or his legacy. Indeed, both schools must be contemplating

whether they can do the reverse of an honorary degree, and take one back for

disgracing the institution by association. Bush, who has pushed so many

boundaries these last seven years, may now also have pioneered a new

phenomenon in higher education: the dishonorary degree (or, The Dis, for

short). Given the size of federal grants involved, though, probably Harvard

and Yale wait another 17 months before they hand theirs out.

Anyhow, there's Bush with his master's degree, 'more educated' than Franklin

Roosevelt, and way ahead of either Washington or Lincoln (and not a few

others), who did not go to college. And yet he is widely perceived as one of

the dumbest presidents in history. Go figguh, eh?

There is some contention on this point. Is Bush really so dim, or does he

just play at it for political marketing purposes? I've read a number of

accounts from those who have met with him personally and argue that he is

smarter than he comes off in public, though of course, that's a bit like

saying that Hitler was not such a bad fellow because he didn't murder as

many people as Stalin.

Obviously, though, smarter (even if it's true) does not necessarily mean

smart. It's nearly impossible to imagine how any accounting of this

president could render him as smart. I say that, moreover, even resting the

definition of the term on the ridiculously narrow parameters of Bush

achieving Bush's personal goals. In other words, we can forget entirely

about any semblance of the national interest, which this administration has

wrecked entirely, and without question. But even if we just ask whether Bush

has been smart in terms of taking care of Bush, it would still be

extraordinarily hard to answer in the affirmative.

True, he does have the 'honor' and the 'glory' of an eight year joyride as

president. That's a whole lot of attention for a guy who's spent a lifetime

seeking it. But who wants that if it's incredibly negative attention, if you

become a laughingstock, the village idiot, the worst president ever, the guy

who wrecked his party entirely, the Bush who ruined a family name two-plus

centuries in the making? Moreover, Bush has probably got a lot of good years

left in him which could well yet be spent at a nice comfy prison in Danbury

or perhaps The Hague if his history is ever allowed to catch up to him. And

something tells me that President Hillary will not be in much of a pardoning

mood. Perhaps he could pray to Karla Faye Tucker to put in a good word with

Jesus for him. Oh, wait... Never mind. He will certainly grow more hated

over time, as the bills for his presidency increasingly come due, and no

amount of Camelot or Nancyalot post-hoc repackaging will ever be able to

paste a shine on this stinking turd of a presidency. All this considered,

wouldn't it have been better to just remain down in Texas, growing ever

richer mooching off Daddy's connections and slurping Pinas by the pool,

flipping through 1970s editions of Playboy, rolled-up hundred dollar bill

hanging out of his nose?

The biggest irony of all is that it didn't have to turn out this way.

Indeed, with 9/11, Bush might even have achieved the true kleptocratic goals

of his presidency and still come out ahead of the game, perhaps even

considered by history as one of the better presidents. But they gambled it

all in Iraq on what they thought would be a cakewalk. It was an all-in,

swing-for-the-fence, do-or-die, bet, and at one level there was a certain

logic to it. The American people are so insecure, so lazy about history and

politics, so callous and so casual about spilling other people's blood, that

they would indeed have adored him had it all gone smoothly and quickly. He

would have been a big-shot soothsayer tough-guy, his poll ratings would have

soared, and he would have marched on yet again, probably into Iran or Syria.

At another level though, there was some serious myopia to even this tragic

but unfortunately semi-insightful logic. Only two presidents, to my

knowledge, have ever hit the 90 percent mark since opinion polling began a

half century ago. One was Bush, right after 9/11. The other was another guy

named Bush, after the Gulf War (not coincidentally, a short little blow-out

in Mesopotamia). Did Rove and W really forget that a year and a half after

Poppy did that, this same incumbent president couldn't win an election

against a freakin' governor from Arkansas, a state whose prior claim to fame

was as the butt of jokes about inbreeding? And, what is more, a guy with

more skeletons than Halloween in suburbia continually popping out of more

closets than in the Palace of Versailles? And, just for good measure, with

an irritating wife to boot? What were they thinking?

After 9/11, Bush and Cheney could have had damn near anything they ever

wanted, less perhaps a few monster multi-billion dollar no-bid Halliburton

contracts in Iraq (and even those could probably have been steered to Kabul,

or some hidden base in Madagascar or a pipeline project in central

Uzbekistan, for chrissakes). And they could even have come out of it all

shining, or at least semi-clean looking. Instead, they unnecessarily coupled

their atrocious politics with a massive dose of arrogance and incompetence.

It's quite amazing, really, and we progressives need to be incredibly

thankful for this rather lucky break, the essential equivalent in terms of

historical blunders of Hitler invading the Soviet Union. At every

opportunity where they could rub it somebody's face and make an enemy, they

did. At every chance to choose between a good policy and a bad one, they

elected the latter. Often at no benefit to their nefarious agenda, either.

It's highly fortunate that they did so, because had they not, Bush might be

sitting at a 50 or 60 percent job approval right now, rather than 30, and

the Republican Party might be alive and well, in control of Congress, and

legitimately optimistic about 2008.

This guy, in short, has made a lot of really, really dumb choices, even if

all we're concerned about is his own personal welfare, not the nation's.

That should hardly be a shock when we're talking about someone who, as a

candidate in 2000 offered the fact that he beat a forty-year booze binge as

a major qualification to be president, or a guy who crashed so many business

opportunities in Texas that he finally even named one Arbusto. Sheesh.

And yet still to this day, Ol' W loves to brag that he governs from the gut,

and lots of 'Muricans continue to dig that about him. But why? If it has

gotten him in so much trouble, why does he continue to make these amazingly

uneducated choices, which amount to simply believing that, "because it has

to", the die will turn up a six, without even realizing that the odds are

five to one against.

I suspect there are a handful of basic reasons why Bush governs from the

gut. Not that he's ever sat down and sussed it all out, of course, though

Rove no doubt did as he was putting together his manuscript, "Son of

Machiavelli: Return of the Prince". (Movie rights were supposed to be

auctioned off right about now, but it appears nobody is bidding. Worse

still, they can't find any actors to play the key parts. Mel Gibson turned

down the title role as too ugly, racist and homophobic for him to be

associated with, and they can't even get Charlton Heston to play the Rove

character.)

So why does Bush govern from the gut, even with the spectacular failures his

entrails have so far brought him? First, because it's a whole lot easier,

and nothing appeals to this supremely lazy president quite as much as easy.

Not even obsequiousness, mass violence, or vindication over those (like Mom

and Dad) who have called him a failure all his life.

It turns out that doing public policy right is actually pretty hard work. It

demands substantial information collection, sustained effort, intricate

analysis, thoughtful discussion, careful engineering, extensive political

negotiation, and skilled, detail-obsessed and relentless management before,

during and after implementation. Boring! At least it's boring as hell if you

happen to be the eight-year-old inhabiting the body of George W. Bush.

Policy wonks like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton really get off on this sort

of stuff, but of course they are evil people, even if the reasons for that

aren't quite clear, so that model can be dismissed out of hand. Why does

Bush govern from the gut? The first reason is that being on vacation more

than any other president in history and making speeches in front of adoring

preselected crowds is so much more fun than the hard work of policymaking.

So why not just consult your gut, get it over with, and leave yourself

plenty of time to party down?

A second good reason for this policy-by-viscera practice is that it allows

you to come to any conclusion you want to, including those which would

otherwise be inconvenient if based on factual analysis. And, boy, are some

of them inconvenient for these guys. For example, let's imagine that you're

George Bush and you've got yourself a really bad jones to invade some

foreign country - say, Iraq, just as a random choice - but absolutely no

rationale whatsoever to justify such a completely unwarranted attack. What

do you do? That's easy. Forget real world rationales - those are for

sissies! Govern from the gut. Make it up - preferably something scary and

all Hollywood, like WMD or al Qaeda connections. Ditto global warming, stem

cell research, budget busting tax cuts, Bill of Rights shredding or just

about any policy the Bush administration comes near. Facts don't help, they

hurt. Bad. Ah, but if you're governing from the gut facts are irrelevant -

all that matters is what the president's gut says. When you govern from the

gut, you can do anything you want.

There is a third reason that Bush likes to make decisions in this style.

Looking at the guy in operation, it's hard to imagine a more insecure

individual, let alone president, a more frightened person desperately

seeking the reassurances of solid walls wherever they can be found, even if

it's only in his imagination. The real world, of course, doesn't come in two

flavors - right/wrong, up/down, black/white - the real world is messy,

complicated, and therefore aggravating when not outright terrifying. But

scary has to be avoided at all costs when you're as frightened as George W.

Bush, and therefore the gut once again comes in handy. There are no

complexities, no nuances, no aggravating shades of gray lurking about in

leather jackets with dangling cigarettes, waiting to stir up trouble in this

president's belly. Instead, there are simply two choices, a reassuring

dichotomy between whatever happens to be Bush's preference and that other

alternative, a.k.a. Evil. Given that neatly constructed reality, that's

always a real easy decision to make. One might even describe it as a "slam

dunk" (and one might then even receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for

doing so).

But George Bush is not the only frightened American running around these

days, and a fourth reason for Bush to govern from the gut is that it allows

the administration to project a sense of powerful assurance that many in

this country have been badly craving, particularly in the post-9/11 period,

and particularly as Bush and Cheney and Rove have taken every imaginable

opportunity to amplify those fears wherever possible, and as much as

possible. Again, the real world is almost always highly nuanced,

multidimensional, complicated and contingent. Frightened people don't want

that, though. They want tough, aggressive leadership pursuing a clear, and

clearly superior, agenda that provides reassurance by virtue of its emphatic

insistence, and sometimes little more (and, lately, almost always a helluva

lot less).

Where do you find good stuff like that? In the real world, it does

occasionally show up, say on December 8, 1941, when the course of national

action becomes uncontested and singular in form. Maybe there were three

people in the entire country back then who wanted to send some nicely

groomed State Department suits to Tokyo to try working things out with those

very polite but badly misunderstood Japanese who had just wiped out 3,000

people in a surprise attack on the American Navy. Maybe three. But not more

than that, and quite possibly less. Pearl Harbors are rare, though. Far more

often, any true rendering of existing policymaking conditions would portray

difficult choices with multiple ramifications, both good and bad, associated

with each. Not in George Bush's gut, though. There, people can find the

surety and therefore the reassurance many of them crave at almost any cost,

including cost of the truth, and sometimes even the consumption of their

very sons and daughters as well. Such public insecurities may be enormously

expensive (not least for the rest of us), but that doesn't make them any

less real. Nor, unfortunately, is having a sad sack like George W. Bush as

president lacking in reality, but is instead the desperate product of a

deeply frightened country acting on its anxieties.

So, why does George W. Bush insist on governing from the gut? Because, as

we've seen, it's easier, because it allows him to do whatever he wants to

do, because it helps him to feel secure in his own little frightened world,

and because it scores points for him with American voters furiously seeking

escape from their own nasty demons. Those are lots of good reasons, and

would seem alone to be plenty enough explanation for Bush's decision-making

style.

But, of course, there is one other very good reason to add to the list.

George Bush also governs from the gut because it's all he's got. Being a

lovable rogue, a class clown, a party-down-lampshade-wearing-beer-spilling

frat boy drunk and a family screw-up certainly make for one particular set

of life experiences, and far be it from me to sit in judgment of any given

individual who chooses those paths for themselves.

There's just one problem, though, in this particular case. This individual

happens to be president of the United States. This individual has his finger

on a trigger which could annihilate the planet. This individual is

commander-in-chief of the most fearsome military apparatus ever to exist.

This person makes decisions which dramatically affect people's lives, here

and abroad, including how long those lives actually last. This person

chooses policies that will likely still be impacting what happens in the

world generations from now.

But this individual is woefully unprepared to shoulder such awesome

responsibility. This individual hasn't done his homework over the five

decades he had to prepare for office. His brain isn't up to the task, and

his heart wouldn't know empathy even if they were formally introduced to

each other in a Baghdad emergency operating room.

So there is one more reason that George W. Bush governs from the gut. He has

to. There is so very little else north of there to draw upon.

_______

About author David Michael Green is a professor of political science at

Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers'

reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net [1]), but regrets that

time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be

found at his website, http://www.regressiveantidote.net [2].

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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson

Your assumption is W governs.

That's a bad assumption.

It's not that he's dumb, W just doesn't give a rat's behind about

government or politics or America.

He doesn't care about the GOP or even his own administration. He

doesn't even care about his quagmire.

Cheney makes all decisions.

Bret Cahill

Gandalf Grey wrote:

> American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs From The Gut

>

The answer is self-evident. Bush governs from his gut because he doesn't

have a brain. The media (and Republicans) were proud of the fact that

Rove was called Bush's brain.

If I were a Republican I'd be ashamed if I voted for someone who so

stupid he needed someone else to make all the decisions for him

(decisions based on what was good for the party, never what was good for

the country).

Reagan was dumb, Bush is just as dumb. Reagan made being dumb popular.

Both Reagan and Bush did what no Democrat could do - they destroyed the

GOP (and the reputation of the United States).

--

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