Reflecting on the George W. Bush presidency

In a Huffington Post article prompted by the dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas, Howard Fineman wrote that we need to remember and acknowledge the bottom line about Bush:

"That as unaffected as he was, as charming as he could be, he gave us Iraq (and Katrina) because of his stubborn, even proud, lack of curiosity, his refusal to pay close attention to details, his instinct to delegate power, and his faith in simple answers.

"Bush lived in a world of black and white. He said that it was because of his deep moral beliefs -- and perhaps it was. . . . But knowing Bush as I do -- I covered him from 1994 to 2008 for Newsweek -- I can say that there was another reason for his Manichean view:  It was easier for him to deal with. It gave him further reason to offload key decisions to the men around him, to men he didn't really know and whose motives he never really quite understood.

". . .  He saw no reason to know anything more than what he needed to know at the precise moment he needed to know it . . .  He wanted to sense just enough about people to make sure that they were not a threat, or to suss out how to initiate them into his informal tribe. Ever the fraternity president, he gave everyone nicknames, not out of affection but to keep them at a safe distance. . .

"As a young man, Bush found it hard to focus. . . . [W]hen he prepared for debates, he wrote on large legal pads with a Sharpie pen, only a few words per page in a big, looping scrawl.

"He was a product of Andover, Yale and Harvard, but so far as I could tell, he hated them all. He fit in socially but not academically. The professors were liberals, so he could dislike them for that. But mostly he seemed to fear them because they had the power to test his mind.

"The result of his upbringing and his education was a combustible mix and a combustible man. His "aw shucks" demeanor hid a sense of entitlement -- and yet he was full of resentment at the intellectual, managerial and personal demands that fate had handed him.
The result was his stone-cold refusal to change or to be curious about the world beyond what he already knew of it once he became president.

"There is a durable myth in American history about presidents "growing" in office once they face its unique challenges. . . .  Not so with George W. Bush. He was oblivious to the warning signs of 9/11. He turned control over to Cheney and the neoncons. He told "Brownie" that he was doing a "heck of a job" in New Orleans.

"We went to war in Iraq -- arguably the biggest mistake we have made as a nation since the Vietnam War -- on what turned out to be made-up evidence. Perhaps the best thing one can say about Bush and Iraq is that he wasn't curious enough or closely involved enough to have judged the evidence, or lack thereof.

"But he didn’t really want to."

Fineman comes at it from a liberal perspective, but I think he is right on target.

Ralph