More Evidence of George W Bush's Flawed Decision Making process
More evidence that "emotional intelligence" is not enough, and that there are systemic problems with George W. Bush's Administration and his decision making processes, i.e. if you don't know the facts and your staff is afraid to tell you any bad news, we all have a big problem. [Note: The arrival of new Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton in April, 2006, and the unrelenting and unavoidable bad news from Iraq and other places apparently has forced President Bush to face unpleasant facts and options, to his and our benefit.]
Wrong Facts, wrong decisions; Incomplete facts, incompetent decisions; and if you only talk to people who agree with you can't learn anything.
"It’s a standard joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news. Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the president of the United States.... The bad news early morning on August 30th, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his 5 week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin, his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan had a conference call to discuss the question of the president’s early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aid on the ground, would do the deed. The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington....
President Bush knew the storm had been bad; but he didn’t quite realize how bad. The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans [so] counselor Bartlett made a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety.... How could this be – how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness" as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century – is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter of the media elites and the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn’t read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them. But it is not clear what President Bus does read or watch... Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him.... Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around who... [would tell] them what they didn’t want to hear. When Hurricane Katrina struck it appears there was no one to tell the President the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that FEMA wasn’t up to the job, and that the military wouldn’t act without a declaration from the president....
To his senior advisors living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event.... Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing... and the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics.. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole." Newsweek, September 19, 2005
Let's see... 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and much of the Gulf region the bad news was W would have to cut his month long vacation short by a day or two? Presidential aids who are afraid to bring bad news to W, or otherwise "displease him..." More bad things than embarrassment happens if the Emperor "has no clothes" and none of his aides will tell him.
More evidence:
During a briefing before Hurricane Katrina hit, the president didn't ask a single question, and told soon to be battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."
And more:
"In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush took a swipe at critics. 'Hindsight alone is not wisdom,' he said. In fact, the tragedy of Iraq is that most of these [present] critiques were made -- by several people -- at the time the policies were announced, often before. It's the president who needs to look back and learn from his mistakes. Hindsight may not be the only wisdom, but it is a lot better than operating in the dark." Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, 3/13/06
And More:
"Loyalty is the watchword among Bush administration officials, particularly White House aides. Consequently, George W. Bush in the course of his working day is unlikely to hear a discouraging word." Robert Novak, 1/10/06
And more:
"We always made sure the President was hearing all the possibilities," John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, said. "That's one of the differences between the first Bush Administration and this Administration...." When in an email I asked George H. W. Bush about [Brent] Scowcroft's most useful qualities as a national security adviser, he replied that Scowcroft "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not." J. Goldberg, New Yorker 10/31/05
Also see How Bush Gets His Way and The Real Facts on W's Tax Cuts
The overwhelming evidence is that Bush's personal and administrative decision-making process is systemically flawed since he fails to recognize that good intelligence is hard to get and hard to assess, and bad news doesn't flow up easily in any bureaucracy... and fails to realize that "most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn't fit with what they already believe... and are much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it..." otherwise called confirmatory bias.