The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
Your Gut Only Gets You So Far
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
© October 11, 2004
Page 29
Bush makes decisions by instinct, then he sticks with them.
It's what makes him a good politician and a poor chief
executive at the same time.
No wonder President Bush lost round one in
Miami: he got rusty living in the bubble. The president
looked peeved in the debate cutaway shots not just because
he's a competitive guy, but because John Kerry was leveling
harsh criticism to his face - a new experience for him. Bush
claims not to want yes men and women around him but he's had
little experience in the past four years with anyone else.
Not since last winter - when he handled Tim Russert poorly
and botched a press conference by refusing to admit any
mistakes - has Bush taken tough questions in public. Instead
of responding to those failed outings with more practice,
the Bush team took the most inaccessible president in 75
years and cut him off even further from reality. Anyone
attending his rallies must pledge to be a Bush supporter.
And now the Bush camp has told undecided voters hoping to
participate in this week's "town-meeting debate" that they
are not welcome. Apparently the idea of the president's
having to respond to someone who hasn't made up his mind is
too intimidating for the leader of the free world.
Why is he so afraid of engaging in a real argument? Because
answering more than softball questions requires boning up,
and this president doesn't believe in acquiring information
that contradicts his assumptions. He believes in making
decisions by instinct, then sticking with them without
second-guessing. It's what makes him a good politician
and a poor chief executive at the same time.
Instinct is an undervalued quality. In his forthcoming book,
"Blink," Malcolm Gladwell, author of an influential book
called "The Tipping Point," explains the advantages of snap
judgments. "Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as
good as decisions made cautiously and deliberatively," he
writes. Gladwell explains how the instant intuition of art
experts that a Greek statue was a fake proved superior to
painstaking chemical analysis. Students know from the first
few seconds of class whether a teacher is good or not - and
they are usually right. Bush is a "blink" president (who
blinked incessantly during the debate). He sizes up people
and situations from his gut, often with ample "emotional
intelligence." Operating on instinct keeps everything simple
and clear, without the confusion of facts. Clarity is
important, as Bush keeps pointing out, and clarity works
politically. The voters like it.
The problem is that while snap judgments are better than we
assume, they are hardly infallible. Warren Harding looked on
first impression like a real president, Gladwell notes, but
he turned out to be one of the worst ever. Bush isn't in the
book, but he seems to be a perfect example of the limits of
intuition. The decision to go to war in Iraq was made without
any formal meetings to weigh the pros and cons. It just felt
right at the time. Once you enter a world where instincts and
what Bush calls "core values" trump facts, you lose touch
with the truth and start to fool yourself. Then things go
from bad to worse.
There are ways for leaders to guard against self-delusion.
Britain has a tradition called "question time," where members
of Parliament pepper the prime minister with tough, sometimes
vicious, questions on every issue. If something isn't working
and the P.M. doesn't have a good explanation, he must fix
the problem immediately. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted
regular press conferences in 1933, sessions with reporters
have performed a similar function in the American system. In
preparation for press conferences, presidents have to learn
about what's going on in their own government. If, like Bush,
they don't hold news conferences or venture back on Air Force
One to talk with reporters, the loss isn't the media's (we
can find stories elsewhere) but the president's. He becomes
a prisoner of what his toadies tell him.
Kerry is also showing signs of hiding out from reporters,
but at least he's not proud to be underinformed. Amid a
crisis, a president who is routinely asked tough questions -
one who believes that "policy analysis" is not for sissies -
might be more likely to ask some tough questions himself
and thus improve his odds of avoiding failure. But that's
not Bush. He believes in using broad brush strokes and
leaving the execution to others. We don't know as much
about Kerry - he has never been an executive - but he seems
to be over on the other extreme, gathering huge amounts
of information before making a laborious decision based
on detailed knowledge of the subject.
It's not a great choice - ignorant snap judgments versus
potential paralysis by analysis. The best presidents, of
course, combine decisive intuition and deep knowledge of the
policy implications of their actions. Maybe next time.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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