His supposed intellectual failings are the butt of countless jokes, but so far the question of George Bush's brainpower hasn't hampered his electoral prospects. Why not? In the latest of his dispatches for G2, former New York Times editor Howell Raines asks how important intelligence really is in an American president
Friday August 27, 2004 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1291916,00.html
Pocono Summit, PA. It was here, in the parking lot of Cramer's building supply, only 15 miles from a Nascar racetrack, in a pivotal battleground state, on the back of a battered work van, that we saw the first one. "Somewhere in Texas," the bumper sticker said, "a village is missing its idiot." The next Bush-is-thick sticker showed up at Home Depot on the back of an equally battered pick-up driven by a tough-looking kid dressed for construction work. It said:
BUSH
LIKE A ROCK
ONLY DUMBER
These are signs of the fierce conviction of some voters - and the secret fear of a quieter and perhaps larger group - that George Bush is not smart enough to continue as president. Indeed, if an unscientific survey of bumper stickers, graffiti and letters to the editor in this conservative mountain region of eastern Pennsylvania is an indicator, doubts are spreading, and probably not in a way helpful to the Republicans.
Yet the subject is seldom taken head on by the mainstream newspapers and network news. The discourse about presidential intelligence appears mainly on the internet, in the partisan press, among television comics and at the level of backyard jokes and arguments. The White House has shown a devious brilliance in keeping a contrived debate on John Kerry's "fitness" to be commander-in-chief in the headlines, at the expense of any prolonged journalistic examination of the far more important question of Bush's mental capacity. That uncomfortable question will surely be glossed over when the Republican national convention starts next week in New York.
After four decades of newspapering, including coverage of the "dumb" Ronald Reagan and the "smart" Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, I am not unsympathetic to the problems of reporters and editors trying to inform the public on this touchiest of competency issues. As Richard Reeves commented memorably in a 1976 article comparing Gerald Ford to Bozo the Clown, the rules of conventional journalism make it almost impossible to report that a presidential candidate "had nothing to say and said it badly to a stunned crowd". Big news organisations are captives of our own rules of fairness. Voters are doubly disadvantaged - by a paucity of information in the campaign coverage and by the elusive nature of the evidence about the kinds of intelligence that matter in our leaders.
For example, my generation of White House correspondents was accused of covering up Ronald Reagan's supposed stupidity and his reliance on fictional "facts" derived from Errol Flynn movies and the John Birch Society, the rightwing organisation founded in 1958 to combat the perceived infiltration of communism. In 1981, Clark Clifford, the Democratic "wise man", entertained Georgetown dinner parties with the killer line that Reagan was "an amiable dunce". Twenty years later, we know that Clifford got indicted for bank fraud and the dunce ended the cold war and the entire Soviet era.
This lesson of history raises questions of seeming importance. What is presidential intelligence, and how much does it really matter? Most astute Americans can recite the lists of ostentatiously brilliant presidents who faltered (Wilson, Hoover, etc) and apparent plodders who triumphed (Truman). When I was covering the Reagan White House in 1981, all his top aides were wholesaling Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous comment about FDR possessing "a second-rate intellect and a first-rate temperament". In the end, Reagan confounded scholars, journalists and voters alike. Even so devoted a cheerleader as Peggy Noonan, a Reagan speechwriter, sees him as flawed by "detachment". His diligent and tormented biographer, Edmund Morris, does not even list "intelligence" as an index entry under Reagan, Ronald Wilson. Such entries are also missing from such solid journalistic biographies as those by Lou Cannon and Lawrence Barrett. Morris, in his obituary essay about Reagan in the New Yorker, referred in one paragraph to his instinctive "intelligence" and in the next to his "ignorance".
To be fair, innate intelligence has to do with capability and ignorance to do with variables such as educational opportunity and personal diligence. But the conundrum remains. Is intellect important in presidents? If Americans can't solve the question definitively in the matter of John Kerry and George Bush, we damn sure ought to make an educated guess.
One highly imperfect but salient way to do so is at the level of campaign tactics. Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush? I'm sure their SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead. Yet at this point in the campaign, Bush deserves an A or a high B instead of a gentleman's C when it comes to neutralising Kerry's knowledge advantage. That much was apparent even before the campaign got mired in the current argument over the nasty television commercials questioning Kerry's record of heroism as a Swift Boat commander in Vietnam.
Over the course of the summer Bush, or more likely his political adviser, Karl Rove, dictated the subject-matter of the campaign by successfully triggering Kerry's taste for complicated ideas and explanations. Kerry is telling voters that we live in a complex world. Americans know that, but as an electorate, they are not drawn to complexity. Kerry's explanations about his conflicting votes on the Iraq war and how he would have conducted it are wondrous as rhetorical architecture. They are also signs that Bush has trapped him into having the wrong conversation with the voters. Last week, Bush trumped Kerry's intricate explanation of his conflicting votes on funding the Iraq war by going on Larry King Live and saying over and over that a president must be resolute, and that he will be. Meanwhile, his wife Laura seemed to make a sale with the outrageous claim that her husband's restrictions on stem cells are not really hurting medical research.
Whatever his IQ, George Bush as a candidate is a one-trick pony. The story of the campaign so far is that Kerry is letting him get by with his single trick - endless repetitions of "I make a decision; I stick to it; that's what presidents do." As astute an observer as David Broder has written that Bush's twin millstones - the war and a job-losing economy - may bring about his defeat. I'm not so sure, mainly because Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, keep talking about what the White House wants them to talk about instead of messages that the bumper-sticker guys at Cramer's and Home Depot need to repeat to their buddies. They have yet to force Bush outside his one-trick comfort zone.
That pattern continued this week as Rove demonstrated his mastery of the "Willie Horton strategy" perfected by his mentor, the late Lee Atwater. In 1988, Atwater famously destroyed the campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, with a series of "independent" ads claiming that Dukakis had improperly paroled a convicted rapist and murderer named Willie Horton. This year, wealthy Bush supporters close to Rove have funded a front organisation called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to carry out an "independent" attack on Kerry's well-documented record as a decorated battle commander in Vietnam.
Kerry's demand that Bush condemn the commercial and Bush's hair-splitting refusal to do so dominated the news all week. Bush refers to Kerry's Vietnam service as "noble" while carefully avoiding a specific, direct denunciation of the veterans' grossly misleading ad. There's a good reason for this. The president does not want to identify with these worms who sponsored the ads, but he wants their commercials to keep eating away at the apple of Kerry's much stronger reputation as a warrior.
Happily for the White House, this contrived debate over Kerry's war record diverts voters from a truly important national-security question related to the intellectual capability of the incumbent. Was George W dumb enough to be talked into adopting a flawed strategy for a phoney war by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney? The facts and authorship of these blunders are beyond dispute. Cheney and neo-conservative theorists wanted to make war on Iraq, not al-Qaida. Rumsfeld wanted to do it with a much smaller force than the military needed. What we don't know is why Bush went along.
Bush's former press secretary, Karen Hughes, in her awkwardly named book Ten Minutes from Normal, assures us that what "Bush does best of all" is "ask questions that bore to the heart of the matter". She says that during the 2000 campaign, she and a "brilliant" issues staff "never once succeeded" in anticipating all of Bush's penetrating questions. "He has a laserlike ability," Hughes writes, "to reduce an issue to its core."
In regard to Iraq and the war on terror, there's little evidence of such Bush interventions in the public record or the report of the 9/11 Commission. We have been told instead that the then director of central intelligence, George Tenet, misled Bush by assuring him that Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk".
The millions of us who did not witness this and other potentially laserlike interactions must rely on speculation as to how Bush's mind works. The most informative writing I've seen on that score was an essay published over a year ago in the Atlantic Monthly by Richard Brookhiser, the historian and conservative columnist sympathetic to Bush. "Bush has intelligence, energy and humility," he writes, "but does he have imagination?"
Brookhiser goes on to worry that Bush's limited information "habitat" could cut him off from the ideas necessary to feed presidential creativity in activities like running a major war. ("Habitat" is a wonderfully chosen word in that it invokes the territoriality of White House advisers in general. Can we imagine Rumsfeld, the alpha-male advocate of hi-tech warfare, inviting the commander of an armoured division into the cabinet room to tell the president why it's stupid not to take more tanks to Iraq?)
Brookhiser goes on to speak of Bush's reliance on "instinct" and the fact that Bush's religious "faith means that he does not tolerate, or even recognise, ambiguity". The comments sent my memory reeling back to the Reagan campaigns and what the cartoonist Garry Trudeau called "the search for Reagan's brain". Trudeau's meaning, of course, was that Reagan didn't have one, but these days the phrase is to me more evocative of the journalistic gropings of the White House press corps to explain what, if anything, was going on inside that big, smiling, glossy-haired head. In a filing cabinet I had not opened in over 20 years, I found my own attempt - a 6,000-word draft of "reflections" on "Reagan's mind". I had never turned the piece in to my editors at the New York Times because I felt I had not solved the mystery as to the quality of Reagan's intellect.
I was not the first, nor will I be the last writer to break his pick on that stone. But in reviewing what I wrote in 1982 after two years of close observation of Reagan on the campaign trail and in the White House, I saw a couple of points that seemed worth revisiting as Reagan's self-appointed heir seeks a second term. I characterised Reagan as a "political primitive" who valued "beliefs over knowledge" based on verifiable facts. The White House spin was that this was a positive in that it represented "rawbone American thinking". I also noted that Reagan had a "high tolerance for ambiguity" as to the outcome of policies that proceeded from such rough-hewn thought.
That strikes me as a different - less troubling - trait than what Brookhiser sees as Bush's refusal to recognise the mere existence of ambiguity. In general, I've come to feel that what we have in George Bush is a shadowy version of Reagan's strengths and an exaggerated version of his intellectual weaknesses.
In 1982, at the height of my journalistic desire to explain Reagan's brain, I went to see David Gergen, then a presidential assistant in charge of communications. His was not an easy job, since it included such tasks as explaining Reagan's decision to throw thousands of the most disabled Americans off social security assistance. We're not talking "welfare queens" here. We're talking blind people in wheelchairs.
I told Gergen I wanted to write a piece for the sophisticated reader about exactly how Reagan's mind worked. With a twinkle in his eye, Gergen said, "It will be a long, long time before we can have that conversation."
It hardly seems worth the trouble now. Reagan is in the pantheon, and the American nation and its allies and adversaries escaped mutual assured destruction. Now the US is at war in Iraq in a conflict that could yet metastasise into regional strife or global terrorism. We'll never know how much Reagan thought and how much he gambled in regard to security and economics. My guess is the answer would be pretty scary. So for the 150,000 US troops in Iraq, for the 99% of taxpayers who will not get a five-figure windfall, for the millions of urbanites unsettled by talk of suitcase nukes, it's still worth asking how Bush's mind really works.