There is a third reason that Bush likes to make decisions in this style. Looking at the guy in operation, it’s hard to imagine a more insecure individual, let alone president, a more frightened person desperately seeking the reassurances of solid walls wherever they can be found, even if it’s only in his imagination. The real world, of course, doesn’t come in two flavors – right/wrong, up/down, black/white – the real world is messy, complicated, and therefore aggravating when not outright terrifying. But scary has to be avoided at all costs when you’re as frightened as George W. Bush, and therefore the gut once again comes in handy. There are no complexities, no nuances, no aggravating shades of gray lurking about in leather jackets with dangling cigarettes, waiting to stir up trouble in this president’s belly. Instead, there are simply two choices, a reassuring dichotomy between whatever happens to be Bush’s preference and that other alternative, a.k.a. Evil. Given that neatly constructed reality, that’s always a real easy decision to make. One might even describe it as a "slam dunk" (and one might then even receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for doing so).
But George Bush is not the only frightened American running around these days, and a fourth reason for Bush to govern from the gut is that it allows the administration to project a sense of powerful assurance that many in this country have been badly craving, particularly in the post-9/11 period, and particularly as Bush and Cheney and Rove have taken every imaginable opportunity to amplify those fears wherever possible, and as much as possible. Again, the real world is almost always highly nuanced, multidimensional, complicated and contingent. Frightened people don’t want that, though. They want tough, aggressive leadership pursuing a clear, and clearly superior, agenda that provides reassurance by virtue of its emphatic insistence, and sometimes little more (and, lately, almost always a helluva lot less).
Where do you find good stuff like that? In the real world, it does occasionally show up, say on December 8, 1941, when the course of national action becomes uncontested and singular in form. Maybe there were three people in the entire country back then who wanted to send some nicely groomed State Department suits to Tokyo to try working things out with those very polite but badly misunderstood Japanese who had just wiped out 3,000 people in a surprise attack on the American Navy. Maybe three. But not more than that, and quite possibly less. Pearl Harbors are rare, though. Far more often, any true rendering of existing policymaking conditions would portray difficult choices with multiple ramifications, both good and bad, associated with each. Not in George Bush’s gut, though. There, people can find the surety and therefore the reassurance many of them crave at almost any cost, including cost of the truth, and sometimes even the consumption of their very sons and daughters as well. Such public insecurities may be enormously expensive (not least for the rest of us), but that doesn’t make them any less real. Nor, unfortunately, is having a sad sack like George W. Bush as president lacking in reality, but is instead the desperate product of a deeply frightened country acting on its anxieties.
So, why does George W. Bush insist on governing from the gut? Because, as we’ve seen, it’s easier, because it allows him to do whatever he wants to do, because it helps him to feel secure in his own little frightened world, and because it scores points for him with American voters furiously seeking escape from their own nasty demons. Those are lots of good reasons, and would seem alone to be plenty enough explanation for Bush’s decision-making style.
But, of course, there is one other very good reason to add to the list. George Bush also governs from the gut because it’s all he’s got. Being a lovable rogue, a class clown, a party-down-lampshade-wearing-beer-spilling frat boy drunk and a family screw-up certainly make for one particular set of life experiences, and far be it from me to sit in judgment of any given individual who chooses those paths for themselves.
There’s just one problem, though, in this particular case. This individual happens to be president of the United States. This individual has his finger on a trigger which could annihilate the planet. This individual is commander-in-chief of the most fearsome military apparatus ever to exist. This person makes decisions which dramatically affect people’s lives, here and abroad, including how long those lives actually last. This person chooses policies that will likely still be impacting what happens in the world generations from now.
But this individual is woefully unprepared to shoulder such awesome responsibility. This individual hasn’t done his homework over the five decades he had to prepare for office. His brain isn’t up to the task, and his heart wouldn’t know empathy even if they were formally introduced to each other in a Baghdad emergency operating room.
So there is one more reason that George W. Bush governs from the gut. He has to. There is so very little else north of there to draw upon.
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