A question of competence: George W. Bush has failed in some basics.

POLITICAL commentators are scrambling to explain the extraordinary rise of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 GOP nomination contest. The conventional explanation is that, buoyed by his 9/11 heroism and accomplishments as mayor, he is riding a wave among Republican voters relatively unburdened by knowledge of his chaotic personal life and liberal social views. This is certainly true. But the Giuliani wave has been lent extra force by another factor shaping the political environment: the Bush administration's increasing association with executive dysfunction.

The administration's stumbles have created an implicit "competence primary" in the Republican race, one in which Giuliani--with his success running the fourth-largest government in the country--is particularly suited to thrive. The importance of this aspect of the race is another early drag on the candidacy of Arizona senator John McCain, who is: the only major Republican candidate currently in Washington, D.C.--as always, the focus of disgust with the federal government; the only major candidate without any executive experience whatsoever; and the major candidate--ironically enough--most closely associated with George W. Bush.

That "competence" would become a buzzword, not of Bush supporters but of his critics, is an unexpected turnabout from when he entered office six years ago. Then, it was common to note the experience and gravitas of the Bush team. They were the "adults" who would run Washington efficiently after the drama and dithering of the Clinton years. Bush was the first MBA and CEO president, who would rely on his management skills to harness the abilities of the heavyweights around him.

Instead, the incompetence charge has gained such traction that even many Republicans buy it. Some of Bush's strengths as a political leader, particularly his loyalty and optimism, have proven to have a double edge when it comes to running the government. He has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things began to go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government. He has seemed to have a much stronger sense of ends than means, and neglected the relation between the two.

The upshot is that even Republican primary voters will be looking in 2008 for someone who doesn't run the government like George W. Bush.

It must be said that running a $3 trillion government is too big a job for anyone. There is too much going on for any one person to control or manage it flawlessly, and in no circumstance will the federal government be a model of efficiency. Bush has been hurt particularly by two massive events that might have been beyond the managing of the most talented executive--a hurricane that devastated an area larger than Great Britain in the Gulf Coast and the "ungrateful volcano" of Iraq. But both still tell heavily against his administrative record.

Bush has certainly had successes. The prescription-drug program is, for better or worse, one of his most important domestic initiatives. Its design was hideously complex and its implementation a gargantuan bureaucratic task. Initial stumbles led Democrats and the press to lump it into a narrative of Bush incompetence. It was a high-profile example in an Alan Wolfe essay in The Washington Monthly titled "Why Conservatives Can't Govern." But the program has turned out to be popular, relatively well run, and less expensive then expected.

Alas, there are also plenty of lowlights. If they were to be turned into a trashy TV documentary, it would be billed, "When bureaucracy goes bad": the CIA and FBI prior to 9/11 (the infamous failure to "connect the dots"); the CIA again in the run-up to the Iraq War (the over-interpretation of dated, incomplete intelligence); the State Department and the Pentagon in the planning for the post-combat phase of the Iraq War (no unified plan); FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the recovery since (at first overwhelmed and then simply inefficient); the Pentagon, again, in the equipping of U.S. troops and the reaction to the growing insurgency in Iraq (too slow); the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in the handling of the Dubai ports deal (ham-handed); the Justice Department's handling of the firing of U.S. attorneys (also ham-handed); the Army and VA in the Walter Reed scandal (plodding and unresponsive); the FBI, again, in the matter of national-security letters (inexcusably sloppy).

'GOOD MAN'

Bush's management problems begin with the way he evaluates and values people. Bush has a bad case of the "good man syndrome." That is the tendency, on the slender evidence of a personal encounter or two, to pronounce someone a "good man," on whom a geopolitical relationship can be based or major responsibilities placed. Personal relationships are important to all politicians, and all will rely to some extent or another on their gut instincts about people. But with Bush, it is particularly so.

The most famous example is Vladimir Putin. Bush professed to have gotten a "sense of his soul" and--against the evidence of the Russian leader's background and of common sense--pronounced him "straightforward and trustworthy." Russia has been sliding into a neo-czarist authoritarianism ever since.

Bush obviously doesn't have any control over who rules Russia. Of more relevance to his own government, Bush had Gen. George Casey to dinner, where he watched how he treated his wife and kids and ascertained that he was a good man. In a meeting with journalists in September 2006, Bush cited this as evidence in Casey's favor, never mind that it was clear by then Casey was losing the Iraq War. Whether you are a good man or not has no relation to your ability to fight and win a war. Indeed, the two might be inversely related.

The good man syndrome is related to Bush's clannishness. It was said of the personnel in the administration of George H. W. Bush that they didn't have agendas, but mortgages. The personnel in the second administration don't have agendas, but loyalties--to George W. Bush, to whom many of them owe everything professionally.

This can be a strength. It enhances cohesiveness. But the administration has also overvalued loyalty, tending to shut out other talented people and giving loyalists jobs for which they might not be suited. The thinking was that the administration would be run in such a top-down manner that young and inexperienced people could be placed in positions farther down the food chain without consequence. But those people still have to make decisions and manage people.

Once inside the charmed Bush circle, people tend to stay there, and rise to the level of their incompetence. It's hard for an outsider to break in. When the administration was considering a secondterm shakeup, almost all the speculation centered on how to move current administration officials from one job to another, and that's mostly what happened.

Press secretary Tony Snow--a late addition--is an exception to the rule. Former press secretary Scott McLellan and attorney general Al Gonzales are illustrations of it. The most flagrant example of the rule would have been Harriet Miers, who was only marginally fit--if that--to be White House counsel, but was almost promoted all the way to the Supreme Court. When the qualifications of his choice were questioned, Bush replied that the critics didn't know Harriet Miers the way he knew her and that she was a "good woman."

For Bush, loyalty runs two ways, an exceptional quality for a politician and one that speaks well of his character. Loyalty isn't just owed to him, he returns it.

The characteristic act of Bush's political leadership in the 2000 nomination contest was to lose New Hampshire by 19 points to John McCain--a debacle--and yet not fire his top political aides. This turned out to be the right decision. Doing otherwise would have denied him the services of the supremely talented Karl Rove. By not panicking and focusing his team on the task ahead in South Carolina, Bush righted his campaign and won the nomination. But this approach isn't the right one in every circumstance and, in the presidency, it has ill served him.

Politically, it can put Bush in the position of embracing failure. Instead of declaring an individual or agency's performance unacceptable to him, he defends the questionable performance and therefore associates himself with it. Managerially, it can saddle him with ineffective underlings.

After 9/11, Bush embraced the CIA and eschewed any finger-pointing after the massive intelligence failure that contributed to 9/11. Politically, therefore, the administration got itself in the awkward position of defending the government's handling of the terror threat prior to 9/11. Managerially, he got almost another three years of George Tenet--and the massive intelligence failure prior to the Iraq War.

After Katrina, Bush uttered some of his most notorious words when he was in this rallying-to-his-embattled-team mode. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" was a characteristic Bush statement, defending and encouraging a Bush loyalist. But it meant that for the first crucial days after the storm Bush was promoting and defending the federal response rather than acknowledging its inadequacies and declaring them unacceptable to him--as he eventually did, but too late. His presidency had sustained damage from which it may never recover.

Bush's tendency to circle the wagons can create perverse results. If a criticism of someone is justified, the target of it can still enjoy more support rather than less from Bush. This is what happened with secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. The fact that he became such an object of criticism from liberals, the press, and former generals made Bush more likely to keep him than to jettison him. In the course of standing up to the critics in an act of courageous loyalty, Bush did harm to his party and to the cause on which he has staked so much--the war in Iraq.

Bush's reflex to stand by his man points to a key weakness in his management style. If you are going to delegate and avoid getting mired in the details, as Bush does, there has to be accountability beneath you. You have to be even tougher on your subordinates--who had better be very good--than you might be otherwise. Excessive loyalty only enables drift and dysfunction.

LEADER OF THE TEAM

David Brooks wrote a prescient article for The Weekly Standard on Bush's management style when he was an owner of the Texas Rangers:

   He didn't try to compensate for his weaknesses--his lack of interest
   in the nuts and bolts of team operations. He played to his
   strengths. Uninterested in doing the things he was not good at, he
   delegated day-to-day management of the club and spent his time on
   climate control. He was a constant presence in the ballpark, keeping
   everybody, from the ushers to the players, feeling good about the
   franchise. His ownership group was an ever shifting stew of between
   a dozen and two dozen millionaires; he spent a lot of time keeping
   them happy.

When in 1993 Rangers manager Kevin Kennedy let star outfielder Jose Canseco pitch an inning in a blowout, Canseco hurt his arm and was lost for the season. "I'm not going to second-guess my manager," Bush said, in a statement that, if you substitute "general" for "manager," could have been made about the Iraq War.

Bush's view of presidential leadership makes it even harder for him to admit mistakes and act on them. He considers it a major role of a president--just as he did as a team owner--to project confidence and optimism. And he's right. But Bush can take it too far. When he famously said he didn't read the newspapers, he was partly revealing a psychological strategy to protect himself from the torrent of criticisms that might cause him to appear sour or not so upbeat in public.

Take a president who doesn't like to be discouraged, who has a very tight-knit group of loyalists around him, who values secrecy and hates leaks, and there is bound to be a problem with the flow of information. There is a tendency for all presidents to become isolated, in any case. Jimmy Carter said what he noticed when he became president is that he never again met anyone who hadn't recently bathed. Everything and everyone gets spiffed up and sanitized for a president.

That bad news hasn't gotten to Bush quickly and emphatically enough may account for Bush's poor timing, which seems strange for such an adept politician. On Katrina, the federal government was late by only a day or two. But given the rapidity of the contemporary news cycle, that made the difference. On Iraq, Bush seemed to be practically the last man in America to realize his military strategy was failing. He had clued into it much sooner than everyone knew (working to replace Rumsfeld months before the 2006 election), but acted only when the public had begun to tilt strongly--perhaps decisively--against the war.

Iraq is in a category of its own. More than anything else, it colors the Bush presidency, giving every charge of incompetence extra resonance. A successful executive sets achievable goals, puts in place the right people to achieve them, and establishes a decision-making process that makes their job easier. Bush arguably did none of these in Iraq. Establishing a liberal democracy wasn't achievable (certainly not on the timetable and with the resources envisioned). He had the wrong people attempting to implement the war, beginning with Don Rumsfeld, who didn't truly believe in the policy to begin with and had no idea how to wage an effective counterinsurgency. And the chain of command was so tangled--both in Iraq and in Washington--it's still a mystery how some crucial decisions were made.

In the run-up to the war and its immediate aftermath, planning and execution were hampered by poisonous bureaucratic rivalries within the administration. These kinds of divisions can be healthy, if they lead to the airing and adjudication of rival views. But only if they are managed properly. If not, they lead to an administration feasting on itself, which has often been the case (see Byron York elsewhere in this issue).

Since the election, Bush has reacted appropriately to the failure in Iraq: He fired the defense secretary and generals responsible, formulated a new policy (the surge), and put in place new leaders who believe in it and are capable of implementing it. It is still possible that Bush will turn the war around enough that history won't judge him as harshly as contemporary political observers do.

In a reversal of the usual presidential pattern, Bush's team has gotten more talented in some respects rather than less later in his administration--for instance, Harriet Miers is out as White House counsel, replaced by the respected Washington lawyer Fred Fielding. And a new ethic has taken hold. There was an entirely appropriate round of swift firings in reaction to the Walter Reed scandal. But after six years, the administration can be run perfectly until January 2009 and the charge of incompetence will still bite.

So one thing Republican voters are going to be looking for is a different type of executive from Bush. They will want a manager who is detail-oriented (in contrast to Bush's fondness for delegation), tough (not so reflexively supportive of those in his administration or tolerant of dissension), and proven (in jobs more demanding than part owner of a baseball team or governor in a state where the office is weak). These qualities might prove to have pitfalls of their own, but they play to Giuliani's strengths, and also to those of Mitt Romney. This needn't be determinative, obviously. Many other factors will play a role in the nomination. But the "competence primary" is important, and already raging.