The True Meaning of "Incompetence"

From the standpoint of domestic politics, George W. Bush's current trajectory is baffling. The pol with the killer instinct appears not only to be committing slow-mo political suicide, but to be digging the grave ever deeper and wider to accommodate other Republicans.

A president who once fancied himself bold seems timid. Look at Iraq, and the "surge." If you are truly going to "double down," why do it with an obviously weak hand?

This isn't a mystery - it's of a piece with what we've seen before, maybe its apotheosis: an in-your-face political statement ("we won't pull out - we're doing the opposite!") with some shuffling of personnel - some competent people at that - but without a clear strategy or coherent policy to back it up.

To call this "incompetence" does not do it justice. This issue is at the core of our current ills. Look at it this way: Bush is sitting atop something - the U.S. government - that he neither understands nor much likes or appreciates, and pulling its levers to build something that he also does not understand or appreciate - a civil society in Iraq. The two - the dysfunctional U.S. government and dysfunctional Iraq - may not be mirror images (even the U.S. government isn't quite that bad) but they are strangely complementary.

The Bushies have viewed the government bureaucracy - the individual agency cultures, their analysts and scientists - as basically hostile, the reality-based community. Remember when the EPA put out a study paper linking global warming to human activity in 2002? Bush's response - "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy" - dripped with contempt. (And as it turned out, he didn't actually read it.) Or recall what happened with the CIA and State Department in the run-up to Iraq.

Contempt for "the bureaucracy" is a legitimate position - for a libertarian. But Bush painted himself as someone with big aims and ideas that cost lots of money, and you need a bureaucracy to carry them out. His "big government conservatism" is big, but it isn't conservatism, and it isn't quite government either, in the sense of creating something intended to work. Instead, the basic infrastructure for implementing "big ideas," or for that matter, small ideas, has been systematically marginalized and degraded.

There is a naïve and self-defeating assumption underneath all this that government just sort of always works. No matter what abuse you rain on it, no matter what political mileage you extract from that abuse. Look at the attempts to seed Iraqi agencies with supply-siders and political hacks. Writing a book about Katrina, I was stuck that Bush, after signing off on a massive government reorganization that gutted FEMA, expected those hurricane guys to just do what they always did.

Ironic, that a president who turned policy into a no-respect subsidiary of Rove's political shop could not recognize or respond to the political disaster that resulted.