It's amazing how often first impressions -- in love, in friendship, and in politics -- end up being exactly right. Relatedly, how often people live up (or down) to what seem to be, based on those impressions, their destinies.
When Bill Clinton first emerged in the summer of 1991 as someone who was likely to seek the presidency the next year, the first impression was of a brilliant man who was at times too clever by half; the first thing we heard about him was that he had a woman... thing. Sure enough, seven years later, that personality trait and that penchant combined to help create the crisis of his presidency (although I should stress that I'm of the school that believes that crisis was chiefly driven by his fanatical ideological enemies and a mainstream media that lost all sense of perspective and priority).
Likewise, when we first got a look at George W. Bush in the spring and summer of 1999, the first impression was of an amiable and colossally pliable lightweight. And, where conservatives had fed the story line about Clinton's womanizing in 1991 and 1992, liberals in 1999 and 2000 tried to advance the story line that Bush wasn't intellectually up to the job of being president. The charge soaked into the culture, becoming the basis for Letterman and Leno motifs about Bush. But politically, it didn't work all that well, because such charges tend to come out sounding elitist; throughout history, they have always been countered with an assertion that the person in question may not be a deep thinker, but he has core convictions that give him a special bond to the masses and so on.
But it was true about George W. Bush. My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward's new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward's account shows a man who just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question "What if we're wrong?"; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It's a profoundly irresponsible way to govern.
What his defenders will continue to call his "idealism" -- the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty's bounty across the globe and so on -- is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It's fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush's. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door.
Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God's messenger of liberty, things like the State Department's multi-volume report on post-war Iraq -- a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass -- became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?
And so hundreds are dead today who didn't need to die, because the possibility of their deaths was not supposed to be part of the great plan and therefore was not contemplated in its mandated fullness. There exists no acceptable definition of "idealism" by which the above qualifies as such. Neither is it quite malevolence. Dick Cheney is malevolent, all right, but he's not the president, at least officially; not the one making the final call. It is incompetence. It is shallowness. To put it more colloquially, it's trying to wish something true; we've all done it in our private lives, so we all know how irresponsible it is.
And it's happening because the guy in charge doesn't know any better. Our first impression was, catastrophically, right.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
