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Bush's White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies--the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn't care about the details--that results don't matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed. Bush opposed a Department of Homeland Security, then supported it as a campaign ploy--and then allowed it to be slapped together carelessly, diminishing the effectiveness of the agencies involved. The White House proposed a massive Medicare prescription-drug plan and then flat-out misrepresented the true costs (and quietly included a windfall for drug companies). Every bit of congressional vanity spending, every last tax cut, was approved. Reagan proved that "deficits don't matter," insisted Vice President Dick Cheney.
The second terms of Presidents are notoriously dreadful, but I wonder: Has the Permanent Campaign made the problem worse because it renders the politicians more myopic? Republicans seem better at campaigns, permanent and otherwise, than Democrats. It may be that conservatives just don't take governance as seriously as liberals do, and therefore have more freedom to maneuver. Didn't Reagan say government was "the problem, not the solution"? The very notion of planning for the common good, especially long-term planning, seems vaguely ... socialist, doesn't it? The Bush Administration is filled with hard-charging executives but bereft of meat-and-potatoes managers. Not much priority is placed on pedestrian things like delivering the ice to New Orleans or keeping the peace in Baghdad. Important government agencies--the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency--are run by political cronies or worse, by special-interest allies of the President intent on eviscerating the regulatory power of the agencies they were sent to manage. There is an arrogant slovenliness to it all that neuters the essential tenets of the conservative vision--that efficient markets are the best way to create wealth, that Democrats are puerile dreamers and Republicans adult realists.
A library will be written about the President's decision to preempt the nonexistent threat of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It was a tough call, with principled arguments on both sides, and it is easy to forget now that almost everyone, even the French, believed that the weapons existed. But there was nothing principled about the Administration's failure to recognize that lethal chaos was likely to follow the invasion. There was a delusional unwillingness to plan for a guerrilla insurgency, especially on the part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who vastly underestimated the number of troops necessary for the operation--and who uttered some of the most embarrassing words ever spoken by a U.S. official as anarchy took hold. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said, when asked about the looting in Baghdad at an April 11, 2003, press conference. "... [F]reedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."