EVENTS

Date:	Monday, January 13, 2003
Time:	1:00 PM -- 3:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

January 2003
The Right Man

In The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (Random House, January 2003), former presidential speechwriter and current AEI resident fellow David Frum takes a behind-the-scenes look at the first year of the George W. Bush White House. From a narrative of the White House response to September 11, 2001, to an in-depth portrait of the Bush team and the president, David Frum provides the first inside account of a historic year. The Right Man includes descriptions of events, the president's beliefs, his influence on the Republican Party, and his transformation into a decisive, successful, and popular leader. David Frum discussed his book at a book forum on January 13.

I was not, to put it mildly, an important person in the Bush administration, but I had a good seat for the historic events of late 2001 through early 2002. I began this adventure with a lot of questions, as did the majority of the American people, as well as many within the conservative movement. Only having been on the national scene for six years, Bush was a relative unknown and he had not been active in the factional debates within the Republican Party. Through my firsthand experience with the president, I learned a great deal about his mind and his personality and came to realize that he is indeed the right man for the job.

 

One of the remarkable things about George W. Bush is that he has a good idea about who he is and what his strengths and weaknesses are. The members of the Bush family are not famous for their Ciceronian eloquence. George H. W. Bush responded to this lack of eloquence by disparaging the power of words. He was famously not interested in working with speechwriters; he famously refused to work from a text; he famously insisted on speaking off the cuff; and the results were famously disastrous. The younger Bush decided to fix this by enlisting the best people to help him and by keeping them updated on how and what he was thinking. He often invited the staff writers in to engage in free-association exercises in order to convey what he was thinking. As a result, I got a chance to see how the man works, and it was an interesting thing to see.

 

Let me start talking about Bush’s mind by talking about three frequently made comments. The first is that Bush is, to be blunt, not too bright. The second is that he is too much like a cowboy, that he is too reckless and bellicose. The third is that he is not a person of clear ideological views. This last comment I basically agree with, though I believe there is a lot more to this story that deserves serious consideration because it contains lessons for the conservative movement.

 

In the American media, Republican presidents fall into two categories. The first, and larger, category is the moron category, which includes Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, and the elder Bush. The second category, slightly smaller, is the evil category. This includes Hoover and Nixon. Republican presidents can be conceded intelligence as long as it is understood to be a device for the promotion of a completely malignant agenda. In Washington the media has already begun the process of demoting Bush from the moron category to the evil one, but in the rest of the country the myth that he is a man of limited intelligence still survives. In fact, because he is a principled and cautious decisionmaker who likes to let positions ripen, Bush’s intellect is far from being ill-suited to the office that he holds. It is true that Bush forgot the name of Taiwan’s president during the 2000 election; it is also true that the mind of a great political leader is less like that of an intellectual, designed to gather and manipulate information, and more like that of an artist who has the ability to see new possibilities. Bush exhibited this creativity in his dealings with Taiwan in the summer of 2001. Unlike the presidents of the past twenty years, Bush saw that the policy of constructive ambiguity regarding Taiwan was out of date. Since the policy was designed, Taiwan had two democratic elections, and it was now time to grant it the security guarantee it deserved. By doing so, Bush proved his imagination and a refusal to be trapped by the dead hand of the past.

 

The striking thing about George W. Bush’s mind is that he has an immediate air of command. The negotiations between Time magazine and the White House over the Man of the Year coverage broke down because Time insisted that Bush and Vice President Cheney share the honor. Unfortunately for Time, the editors did not realize that Bush, like all presidents before him, understood that the terrible weight of presidential decisionmaking can not be shared because when decisions go wrong, the blame falls entirely on the president. Bush certainly uses the advice that he receives, but in the end the decision is his. He is a commanding personality who knows his own mind and is not afraid to make decisions.

 

On the question of whether or not Bush is too bellicose or a cowboy, I believe that one of Bush’s greatest gifts to the country was his gift of restraint in the immediate aftermath of September 11. There was a real political moment there when the rage of the country could have slipped out of control. Rather than succumb to it, Bush restrained and rejected it. He rejected proposals to act too hastily or overwhelmingly to Afghanistan, and he declined calls for immediate war with Iraq. He also refused to give in to the call for racial profiling on airlines to increase security. In the end his restraint had turned the war on terror into a national war, behind which most Americans are generally united. That is one of Bush’s greatest achievements.

 

Finally, President Bush is not really an ideological man. When he was touring the country to rally support for his tax cut, he used a blend of pop-keynesianism, folk-libertarianism, and half-remembrance of supply-side theory. What he was clear about was that high taxes were bad, low taxes are good, and that he was going to fight that fight however he could. On the stem-cell debate, he took a consistent and principled position, but it was not a defiant one. George W. Bush is much less laissez faire than his conservative predecessors of the 1970s and 1980s. The idea that the Republican Party is going to become a party of radical economic individualism seems to be retired. The party is becoming much more active and vital on a social agenda, one very much related to the attitudes of American evangelicals and Roman Catholics. That is where the stem-cell research stance and the faith-based initiative came from, and it is the direction in which Bush is leading the Republican Party. In the debates surrounding the agriculture bill and the stem-cell decision, the president put forth positions that the Republican Party, by and large, supported. As a result, Bush has shifted the center of gravity in the party from libertarian economics to a conservative social agenda.

 

 The consolation for the platform being less clear-cut and less principled than the old platforms of the Republican Party is that this could lead to being a majority platform. One of the things we on the right are going to have to ask ourselves is how forced our smile is going to be as George W. Bush remakes this party into a majority party. Are we prepared to win with him or are we prepared to lose as we have so often lost in the past?

 

AEI research assistant Andrew Kelly prepared this summary.