SCRUTABILITY:

A Fetish of Candor (DAVID BROOKS, 12/13/03, NY Times)

I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.

Until the Bush team came to power, foreign relations were conducted with a certain gentlemanly decorum. The first Bush administration urged regime change in Iraq, without sullying itself with the Iraqi peasants actually trying to do it. The Clinton administration pretended to fight terrorism without committing the sin of unilateralism by trying very hard.

The United Nations passed resolution after resolution condemning the government of Iraq, without committing the faux pas of actually enforcing them. The leaders of France and Germany announced their abhorrence of Saddam's regime, and expressed this abhorrence by doing as much business with Saddam as possible.

Then came George W. Bush, the cowboy out of the West, and all good manners were discarded. The first sign of trouble came when the Bush administration declared its opposition to the Kyoto treaty. Up until that time, all decent governments had remained platonically in love with the treaty. They praised it, but gave no thought to actually enacting it.

Bush said he would scuttle it and did.

Then Bush scandalized the world by announcing his desire to enforce the U.N.'s resolutions on Iraq. And he gave a speech announcing his doctrine of pre-emptive war. Instead of merely taking out Saddam while pretending to abide by the inherited rules of conduct, he actually announced what he was going to do before doing it. This was honesty taken to a reckless extreme.

Now his administration has taken to honesty like a drunken sailor. It has made a fetish of candor and forthrightness. Things are wildly out of control.

Of how many presidents can it be said that the best way to discern what they're going to do is to listen to them?

MORE:
The pragmatist and the partisans: How Bush has positioned himself to face a referendum on his incumbency (David M. Shribman, December 10, 2003, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

The 2004 election is, like almost every election in which a president runs for re-election, a referendum on the incumbent. And so, with the election year about three weeks away, it's useful to look at the landscape President Bush has painted for the election and at the ways in which he -- and events that have occurred in his first term -- have changed the presidency:

The ascendancy of compassionate conservatism. This is one of the most telling phrases of the Bush years. The emphasis on compassion derives from the president's religious foundation, which developed with the guidance of his wife in a Midland Methodist mega-church, and his social standing, which he inherited from a patrician grandfather who served in the Senate and a patrician father who preceded him in the White House. The emphasis on conservatism comes from political beliefs that came of age when he did politically, during the Ronald Reagan years. "He's kind of like a baked Alaska," says Fred I. Greenstein, the Princeton expert on the presidency, "a bit of Barry Goldwater with maybe a frosting of Nelson Rockefeller." [...]

The president's flexibility and resilience. The president has been in politics for a period far shorter than that of several of his rivals, particularly Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. In Texas, Bush worked comfortably with a Democratic lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock. In Washington, he came to believe that a partisan approach was necessary. Same guy, different circumstances.

All that leads to the conclusion that the president may be the greatest pragmatist on the political scene today. Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont may score points in the Democratic nomination contest by speaking derisively of the purity of the president's conservatism, but the general election will be about the effectiveness of the president's pragmatism.

The new era in global affairs and the Bush foreign policy. Foreign commentators and domestic critics have complained from the start about the president's inexperience in world affairs and his insistence on unilateralism. (They also complained about his skepticism about nation-building, an exercise he has taken on not in one place, but two -- Afghanistan and Iraq.) Now, however, Bush is a war president with more experience than his father and, as last week's decision on steel tariffs showed, with a sharper ear for the court of world opinion and the prerogatives of global organizations than he might have had before. Both Bush and the Democrats recognize that foreign policy will be a bigger part of this election than any since 1968 -- a fact that presents Bush with great challenges but also great opportunities.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2003 7:52 AM