Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

yoo saying the president is dumb ?!?
That's Treazon isn't it ?

I also think that it is totally unfair. Bush is not that dumb, and Cheney is not dumb at all. It's very hard for even very smart people who are questioned separately to keep their stories consistent, unless, of course, they are willing to tell the truth.

Brad, why do you hate America? ;)

No question about Bush's stubbornness. I doubt that even Cheney could pull Bush in a direction he didn't want to be pulled in.

But it sure does strongly suggest that Bush is afraid to go out there on his own, even though only the 9/11 Commission will actually see and hear his responses. I don't think Bush is totally devoid of brains, but I don't think he believes he's capable of explaining or justifying his decisions in the War On Terror before an even mildly critical panel. Cheney is there to be his brain.

Is he afraid to reveal that he does not have any idea what he is talking about?

Is he afraid to reveal that he does not have any idea what he is talking about?

I agree that while it's fun to kid about, Bush is not a complete dope -- but he is of middling intelligence at best.

What's more, there are many things the man was not familiar with on coming to office, being unknowledgeable on the Middle East, he was educated by the neo-cons. Having received their instruction, and not being curious to inquire into any other other position, he has now stubbornly refused to learn from his mistakes.

And that is why he is dangerous.

Is he afraid to reveal that he does not have any idea what he is talking about?

Is he afraid to reveal that he does not have any idea what he is talking about?

Is he afraid to reveal that he does not have any idea what he is talking about?

It has been shown time and time again, most recently on Meet the Press, that W is incapable of being interviewed without a script and putting together a string of intelligent, coherent answers. He may not be a dope, but he is the stupidest, most incompetent President in the last century.

>I doubt that even Cheney could pull Bush
>in a direction he didn't want to be pulled in.

This is the fellow we expect to _just_leave_the_White_House_ should he lose the election, right?

It's difficult to tell how intelligent Bush is. Supposedly he's dyslexic (reportedly Neil Bush is too) although dyslexia didn't stop Nelson Rockefeller and unlike Bush, Rockefeller grew up at a time dyslexia was hardly a diagnosis, forget widespread knowledge of effective treatment. He does seem to have difficulty assembling his thoughts in a way that can be verbalized. However, I do think Bush suffers from a possibly irremediable sense of rich kid's entitlement. He seems to believe that he's better then most people (definitely non-wealthy people) just because he's rich and they're not. He's known to be rude and cutting when he feels someone's inconvenienced him or hasn't jumped when he wants the person to jump. Early on (the famous Alabama campaign he worked on while ostensibly in the National Guard) he was indoctrinated into "smear" campaigning--and he doesn't seem to have been put off at all by the nastiness--so apparently he believes it's ok, possibly a great idea, to savage any opponents (i.e. anyone who disagrees with you) and if smearing works (as opposed to dealing with differences on issues important to the electorate) that's just fine with him. I've heard it mentioned that he's charming, but people said the same thing about Ted Bundy, so charm is just charm, it's meaningless as measure of a person's character unless accompanied by other qualities. I think Bush's behavior suggests he lacks empathy, any understanding (or desire to understand) people other then those of his class, or share their interests. Immature (partly because of the years of binge drinking and partying--fogs your mind and who knows how many brain cells he destroyed?), mentally rigid, mentally lazy, incurious about the world (I can't imagine having all that money and not traveling all over the world, perhaps going to school in another country just to learn the language well or experience living in another culture--but Bush seems to have gone nowhere) and possibly shallow intellectually. I certainly agree he's incompetent to lead the US.

He's not a puppet. He's a dog. A mean one.

So he's a very inflexible puppet.

As an aside, this morning on NPR I heard something interesting. Dan Schorr was talking about the Bush/Cheney thing, and mentioned the analogy of Cheney being a ventriloquist. He then said Bush would be the "voice".

It's like he couldn't bring himself to call Bush the dummy. What Schorr said makes no sense.

>What Schorr said makes no sense.

It's happened a lot lately.

Unfortunately.

azurite's observation of immaturity is supported by Bush's well known habit of giving everyone silly nicknames. Long ago I was in a frat house and everyone was required to have a silly nickname.

Any 57 year old who would call a man like Paul O'Neil "Diego" definitly suffers from "Arrested Development."

¿Why every time that a politician in the USA turns out to be a less than competent public speaker, the excuse is ¡Dyslexia!?
Dyslexia is, as the name suggest, a problem with reading and writing, not speaking.
Dyslexics are quite capable as speakers.

Mr Bush is inarticulate, but he is not dumb. I suspect that Mr Bush himself is responsible for pushing forward many of the policies of his administration.

The guy was a frat boy president, so that at least attests to having political skills. A sense of entitlement and a belief that you are the most deserving can carry the day in spite of the odds. The outcome of the 2000 election was as much due to the Bush insistence that the election victory was his entitlement and that Mr Gore was not entitled. The lack of conviction by Mr Gore that he had won by all rights led Mr Gore to cave in to a flawed process.

Mr Bush is politically savvy. He is also mean, vindictive and stubborn. In a fight, he is a guy you want on your side because he is the "don't get mad get even, type". This is why Mr Bush was so popular after 911. At the same time, if Mr Bush is on the other side of an issue, it is bad news. He is not curious, willing to listen or change his mind. This is why policy from this adminstration is so screwy. If Mr Bush makes the correct decision on a policy early on, it is OK. But if Mr Bush makes a policy decision that is not good, there is little hope of persuading him otherwise.

Even the policy process, as described by Paul O'Neill is deeply flawed. It is scripted to support the conclusion of the president going in. It is not an honest debate. One wonders if the honest debate over the 2003 tax cuts is really what got O'Neill Lindsey Daniels and Hubbard fired. They all went off script.

Bush isn't that stubborn all the time. The good people at the Center for American Progress have been chronicling his flip-flops recently. E.g., finally permitting Condi Rice to testify publicly to the 9/11 Commission. Or, to take another example, Prof. DeLong posted recently about the sequence in the Clarke book relating the events on 9/11 in which Bush first announced that he was coming back to D.C., end of discussion, and then was talked out of it by Cheney. So he has a stubborn streak, but it must be that the people around him know how to push the buttons to get around it.

Does it really matter why the administration insists on having Cheney present? Or whether or not Bush could make the case without him? Whatever the reason, the result is another demonstration of these people's incredible tin ear. How could they not realize how bad a light this would put Bush in? Its inviting late night tv to pile on.

I've asked before...do these people work overtime at their stupidity? Do they get awards?

Wasn't Karen Hughes supposed to fix all this?

According to O'Neill, a favorite Bush line is "I refuse to negotiate with myself." This means, he refuses to hear arguments or entertain changing his mind unless forced by his political opponents. Fraternity politics are all about winning the game. There are no real world consequences to winning or losing. There is no "right decision". There is only winning and losing. That is all that Mr Bush understands. Either HE wins or HE loses. That his policies could create life altering effects on other people does not seem to have crossed his mind, other than thinking that his tax cuts are making a real differnce for poor people.

It's the court appointed incompetant's Jump the Shark moment.

This could well be more to protect Cheney than to insure Bush saying the 'right stuff'. Cheney has said numerous things, in public to select groups, that are now known widely to be falsehoods. The times at which he made these statements make it at least plausible that he, himself, knew they were lies and that he deliberately said them to the select audience in order to maintain a certain blind belief in the administration among a significant portion of the electorate.

This administration is in a peculiar bind when it comes to secrecy, it seems to me. The more certain a 'fact' is, the more secret its source, they say. No one but the most important people should be made privy to the foundations of 'facts'. This position evolved in response to the successful attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, I think. Before that time, the Bush people dealt with unfortunate facts by ignoring them or belittling those who thought such things mattered. But once the dust had begun to settle from the attacks, the administration seemed to realize that decisions needed a bit more basis than simple desire to do the proposed deed, so they began to peddle faith in themselves as strong, perhaps even ordained, leaders in a righteous cause.

And many in this country were hysterically ecstatic at the invitation to be complicit in their own duping. Whatever psychological pathology is animating the Bush-Cheney performance is not happening in a vacuum.

An example to clarify, perhaps, what I'm trying to suggest: the question of Bush's intelligence has so far worked to Bush's advantage because he uses his intellectual mediocrity as a sign of his 'normalcy'. His religiosity insures that the decisions he makes on the basis of his 'gut' are in line with God's will. Many Americans obviously buy this and many other Americans are just as obviously wary of challenging it because of the God stuff and the longtime anti-intellectualism underwriting the ethos of America the Great.

I think DSchultz has hit on a vital point here: The anti-intellectualism of America.

Bush appearing with Cheney seems to work quite well with Joe Average because they empathize completely with Bush. By their lights, Bush is one of them. As long as Bush comes across as being no smarter than the next-door neighbor, they love him because they can see themselves reflected in him.

And that scares the shit out of me. Since the most complex organization the average voter ever gets to handle is Little League or Youth Soccer, they have no idea that running the country takes a bit more smarts than remembering to pick up a case of Power-Aid at Costco. They're much more comfortable with a president who doesn't think because they, themselves, find thinking to be physically painful.

Some good comments in here, except for the ones showing disdain for Joe Average. I would say turn your laser like observation skills on yourself and see what you come up with. The fact is, many people don't have the time or inclination to worry about politics and therefore to with a gut feeling about politicians and policies. Yes, this sucks. No, it won't change anytime soon. It is a reality that those who play the politics game must use in their calculus. Lately it has worked against progressive causes. We must figure out how to change this, not "hate on" Joe Average as the kids say.

That said, the political arm of the admin MUST have known this Bush/Cheney joint appearance would have looked bad. Anyone who comes up with that idea has got to know there would be crappy press about it. For god sakes, the ventriloquist jokes practically write themselves. WHY did they let it go forward? Because it would have been worse to let Bush go it alone, he would have screwed things up royally. There would have been leaks about his appearance, charges of lying, etc.... They had not choice.

I agree with and appreciate most of this thread, esp. the last 3 comments.

Where I grew up, intellect was viewed with a little suspicion, as it was a higher value to work with your hands, to make something useful. Using your brain, in those days, generally wasn't making something useful.

So there's still spillover from those days. The world runs on the 'Joe Averages'. They are not to be disdained because they purportedly are not you - that is just another manifestation of the 'other' that we are trying to get rid of.

As manufacturing jobs leave this country (a la England), we are increasingly making things with our brains. There is tension in this turnover.

D

bakho is absolutely right. Bush is inarticulate, but not stupid. The more that the uncomitted middle hear "pointy headed intellectuals" saying that Bush is dumb, the less they sympathize with us. They expectus to call them dumb too. That's one reason that many are so defensive about their kids' education and being turned over to teachers who might not support parental values. Hence they support creationist policies although few of the uncommitted middle follow Christian teachings closely. Nowhere in Christ's words (so far as they are found in the New Testament) do we hear anything about revenge, or forcing others to do things our way. Bush's acts are not consistent with Christ's teaching.
The idea that Cheney calls the shots is not convincing. GW knows that he isn't a good speaker; he needs front men and women to carry his message. No doubt he was seduced by some of the PNAC ideas, but his ideas about shifting the tax burden down onto the poor were quite apparent as governor.
It's going to be very difficult to defeat Bush. Underestimating him or implying that we want IQ tests for Presidents hurts our message. Bush is reckless, dishonest and finds it difficult to change his policies when they aren't working. He's crushing working class families and selling us out to generations of dependence on Middle Eastern oil- that's wrong, but it's not stupid.

Bush isn't "stupid", unless by that you mean "shortsighted". THAT is completely supported by the facts, defensible to anyone who isn't a born bonehead (which would be about 30% of the Right, as are about 30% of the Left). He's blown it in fiscal, environmental, and foreign policy. It's a funny thing, but you may almost depend upon his shortsightedness. Even the cover-ups are going badly...

My comments may seem to show disdain for Joe Average, but I mean them more as an observation. The appeal of BushCo for Joe Average is BushCo's ability to take complex issues and boil them down to bumper-sticker sloganism. The challenge for Kerry and other progressives is to take nuanced argument and turn it into easily digestible slogans.

I would contend that Bush is, indeed, a simpleton--his life and works provide all the evident one needs to prove that Chance the gardener is now president. It may well be that the sloganeering success of this White House is a result of having to present everything to Bush as bumper-sticker expressions.

Correction to my figures above: I meant about 30% on EITHER side of the TOTAL electorate are hardcore, as polled on various things over the years. So if the country is basically cloven in two, with a 5-10% swing vote in the middle, that means about 60% of the Right, and about 60% of the Left, are inveterate recalcitrants; frozen in time; unable to think clearly; silently smug--or yelling without surcease--to buttress their own fracturing egos; fearful; tiresome; predictable; afraid to ask questions; singleminded and uni-dimensional; sure of their opinions yet misunderstanding history, science and religion; misapplying analysis, so unable to synthesize; and always with a certain place for uncertainty!; pooling in groups for reinforcement and validation; all-knowing, unceasing, quick to biliousness, did I say tiresome...

Prof. Delong writes, "I'm not sure she [Eleanor Clift] has it right. .. other people say that he is also really stubborn--that he can't be moved off a position once he has settled on it. 'He's not a puppet,' they say. 'Far from it.'"

I'm confused by this remark. What doesn't Eleanor Clift have right? How does Bush's being "stubborn" contradict her statements about Bush? Is "stubborn" a quality of intelligence?

Of course, Bush is noted for changing his positions (should Condi Rice testify before the commission or shouldn't she?) But to whatever extent that it's true that Bush can't be moved off a position, it seems more likely that it's because it took him so long to memorize the position he's supposedly "taken" that he'll be damned if he's going to have to remember the justification for a new position.

Well, I think BUsh is stupid, but I'm willing to hear an argument for the other side. On the other hand, there's no question at all that he's as ignorant as a pile of Texas pigshit.

I was/am certainly no fan of Dan Quayle, but Georoge W. Bush makes _Quayle_ look like a rocket scientist and deep political philosopher.

Cranky

There has been a lot of chatter in this thread to try to debate whether of not Bush is "stupid". Some have tried to argue that because he has some skills in politics that he can't be all that dumb. I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag.
The job of President calls for skills in politics at times (election, re-election, and getting your priorities moved forward by Congress). However, I think the job also demands a good deal of intelligence in POLICY once you're given the reins of office.
To be effective, Presidents must create sound directions on a widely diverse spectrum of policy options that are directly controlled by the Office of the Presidency (economy, foreign affairs, domestic issues influenced by government). This is the area where Bush fails utterly. He has proven himself to be ideologically driven in the policy development process time and time again (stem cells, ANWR, steel tarrifs, war). When these policies are categorically proven to be really bad ideas, he has been remarkably inflexible to change them. When you have no real skills in policy development, you must rely on your only strengh--politics.

Anyone who's ever been a teacher knows that there's lots of different kinds of stupid, just as there are lots of different kinds of smart--some of which can appear like stupidity under certain circumstances.

To me Bush's problem is exactly what makes him attractive to his constituency: he's a "big picture kind of guy." He doesn't do details, he doesn't remember statistics, he doesn't worry about facts and nuances.

That's why he needs wonky Cheney at his side. Bush can stand up and deliver emotions and principles. But if asked to give information, he will probably perjure himself by accident unless he has a walking reference file.

The problem with being a 'big picture guy' while not caring about the details is that you can end up making grevious mistakes. Bush's idea of the big picture in Iraq looked good, but he's not painted the U.S. into a nasty corner there. It's one thing to have the political skills necessary to be elected a fraternity president, but to be be a decent President of the United States requires something more than that.

The whole "Bush ain't very smart" thing ain't very smart. When Frum told us Bush was "incurious" it was the view of a guy who writes for a living, and who had more opportunity than Eleanor Clift for close observation. "Incurious" gets pretty close to the heart of the matter. "Ain't very smart" or any other broad poke at Bush's intellect is not very discriminating, and so doesn't tell us much that we need to know about him. Anti-intellectual surely gets us closer to the problem. Incurious, too.

Beyond the reality of the situation, there is a problem other posts here have mentioned. When Average Joe types sympathize with Bush, it is in part because they think he is like them. "Bush vs the Smarty-Pants" is not gonna change their minds. One glaring, obvious and dangerous shortcoming in Shrub's thinking is that it is clouded by arrogance. This may be the point we want to make about him. While people who value thinking-before-doing may be swayed by suspicion Bush prefers not to "negotiate with myself", there is plenty wrong with the way Bush thinks that should annoy lots of other folks, as well. Anybody who has ever been told a bald-faced lie by a school administrator, seen a cop behave as a law unto themselves, seen a CEO and his companions use up public resources in a conspicuous way, or been told by the biggest or most popular kid in the class that nobody elses' opinions matter - these are people who could be brought around to voting against Bush. Tell them Bush is dumb, and they may just vote for him.

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