The Bush governing style

Two good recent articles

From Slate

All the President's Flunkies

As a broader management practice, though, Bush has made a fetish of loyalty even when unaccompanied by ability. He saw how disloyal aides undercut his father. To win loyalty, Bush shows it.

From The Atlantic:

The Rove Presidency

Rove’s greatest shortcoming was not in conceptualizing policies but in failing to understand the process of getting them implemented, a weakness he never seems to have recognized in himself. It’s startling that someone who gave so much thought to redirecting the powers of government evinced so little interest in understanding how it operates. Perhaps because he had never worked in government—or maybe because his standing rested upon his relationship with a single superior—he was often ineffective at bringing into being anything that required more than a presidential signature.

I disagree on this point:

Rove wouldn’t be Rove, in other words, were Bush not Bush. That Vice President Cheney also hit a historic high-water mark for influence says a lot about how the actual president sees fit to govern. All rhetoric about “leadership” aside, Bush will be viewed as a weak executive who ceded far too much authority.

Many of Bush's leadership failures grow out of the lessons he learned at the Harvard Business School. he is a strong executive but a weak leader because that is the model CEO of management textbooks. In addition, that executive model is especially susceptible to flunkyitis.


See also:

GWB and his MBA


The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy


Five quick points about the conservative tantrum