By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-509635.mp3
Dallas, TX –
I heard a wise man, a supporter of George W. Bush, say that this president has two central personal problems in the conduct of his office. First, he wants to be a one-man show. Hence his appointment of John Bolton to be chief of staff. It marks the arrival of yet another behind-the-scenes manager when an out-front leader of acknowledged reputation is needed. There's nothing wrong with either Card or Bolton except that this change is no change at all. It will do nothing to bring a fresh new day to a badly depleted White House.
Bush is terrified always of being upstaged. That has prevented his realizing what the wise man also said: that a president must surround himself with strength. It's the reason he has been so pleased to have Dick Cheney as vice president. Bush knows that Cheney does not want the top job, and that, he believes, is all to the good, except, of course that it has prevented his developing a strong Republican contender for the presidency in 2008. Bush 43 is the first president since Harry Truman not to nominate at least one second-in-command who later ran for the Oval Office on a major ticket, except, of course, for George H.W. Bush, who gave us the hapless Dan Quayle. Quayle wanted to be president, but never got anywhere with Republicans.
Bush's other problem, said this wise man, is that he is not content to be an adequate president, as his father was, and as most heads of state are destined to be. Instead he wants to be another Washington or Lincoln. But he doesn't understand that presidents like that come along only once every hundred years, and our last leader of that caliber, FDR, died in office only six decades ago. To aspire to this kind of greatness requires a war, and Bush has produced two of them, the last growing more calamitous with every moment.
The worry now is what comes next in the President's pursuit of this wholly unrealistic assessment of himself and his situation. This is where an experienced chief of staff could have been helpful. Someone with the savvy and stature of Jim Baker could have countered the oddly off-key judgment of Dick Cheney and the willful obliviousness of Donald Rumsfeld to whom it apparently never has occurred that things are not going swimmingly in Iraq.
I heard one observer say that the reason the President has not replaced Rumsfeld is he fears that confirmation hearings in the Senate would dredge up too much recent history of torture in his administration. If this is true, a strong adviser as chief-of-staff could calm those fears and devise a way through the troubled waters created by Rumsfeld to a defense posture that is sensible and, ultimately, acceptable to the nation.
It's heartbreaking to hear Bush continue his insistence that "we're winning in Iraq." Surely he knows this is not case, and no amount of leaked partial intelligence will alter the tragedy of his tenure. What could redeem it, however, is relinquishing the dream of Mt. Rushmore and replacing it with a tough-minded admonition to himself and the rest of us that "in times of crisis, the safest place is the hard truth."
Lee Cullum is a contributor to the Dallas Morning News and to KERA.
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