Jingkan Blog

Bush has long concentrated sharply on decision-making as the focus of his style and behavior. He strongly believes that the most important thing he can do is to decide, and thereby chart the course for his team—and the nation—to follow. He’s tough and he sticks to his guns. “He’s made a science out of selling [...]

Bush was also keenly aware that his father had failed to capitalize on the success of the Gulf War and on the huge surge of public support that accompanied it. The economy weakened in the months following that war, and it dragged down Bush 41’s hopes for a second term. In Bush 43’s case, as [...]

Bush and his advisers denied that he was driven by the failure of his father to win reelection, but the parallels were too obvious to ignore. In the Gulf War, Bush 41 halted American troops short of a campaign to remove Hussein. At the time, his advisers believed that continuing the war would risk splintering [...]

Bush aimed to translate his electoral success into a two-pronged policy strategy. First, on the international front, he carried over popular support for his war on terrorism into a campaign to disarm Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Second, on the domestic front, he worked to cement his first-year tax cut into an enduring economic stimulus plan. Together, [...]

As the 2002 midterm elections approached, Karl Rove developed a strategy for a full-court press. Conventional wisdom is that the party of incumbent presidents always loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections. That has held true for every midterm election in the last century, except for Democratic party wins in 1934 on the coattails [...]

Effective leadership depends on the political capital leaders have to spend. Some leaders start with a large supply; some with little. Leaders can only act if they have the capital to reinforce their decisions. Fighting battles drains capital. Winning them can help build it. John F. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, charted it on a [...]

Bush has always been easy to underestimate. He was a C student at Yale better known for partying than studying. His first political race, a run for Congress, ended in defeat. His penchant for malapropisms became well known, with Web sites devoted to cataloguing his misuse of words. Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon is a [...]

“I’ve got confidence in my capabilities. I love to be underestimated.” —George W. Bush, Quoted in U.S.A. Today, June 8, 2000 “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.” —Benjamin Disraeli Perhaps the most consistent thing about George W. Bush’s career is that he has consistently exceeded expectations. Texas punsters said he [...]

Along with the Team Bush penchant for disciplined pursuit of strategy and message came a proclivity for closed-door, closed-mouth decisions. Leaks were rare and leakers quickly found themselves on the outside looking in. There simply wasn’t a presidency in memory that managed such tight control of the decision-making process. The secrecy of the administration’s discussions, [...]

Team Bush, if nothing else, quickly became the most tightly managed White House operation in recent memory. Internal dissent in the Carter and Reagan administrations regularly appeared in newspaper headlines, with warring leaks captivating Washington insiders. Those leaks, and the scuttlebutt they produced, undermined the Carter administration (even before it got started) and weakened the [...]

Bush’s style comes from the MBA playbook: focus on the big issues, decide on the major strategy questions, and delegate the details. He’s practiced it more than any president ever has. The style, in turn, has framed the way the rest of the White House staff has worked. Bush created both the aura and the [...]

Especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush stirred widespread approval for his strong stand and pledge to avenge the thousands of lives lost. He told Americans he wanted to bring Osama bin Laden to justice “dead or alive.” He called the terrorists “evildoers” and “barbaric people.” He called for allies to stand “with us [...]

During its first two years in office, Team Bush showed remarkable cohesion—and remarkably little backbiting. The administration included some of Washington’s most renowned and experienced in-fighters; yet, at least in public view, the policy debates were civil and the team remained tight. Tight and disciplined, that is, except for the economic team. From almost the [...]

Team Bush demonstrated more discipline, focus, and efficiency in its first years than any presidential administration in recent memory. “If there is dissent within the administration, we never hear about it,” one Washington reporter said. When the president makes a public appearance, he has a story to tell and steadfastly refuses to be distracted by [...]

People who know Bush report that his most outstanding feature is his easy way with people. He often teases visitors and mugs for the cameras. He was a prankster on the 2000 campaign plane and sometimes (literally) turned the cameras back on reporters. Engaged in arguments over policy issues in the hallways of the Texas [...]

If I have erred, I err in company with Abraham Lincoln. —Theodore Roosevelt My administration will continue to act on the lessons we’ve learned so far to better protect the people of this country. It’s our most solemn duty. —George W. Bush, November 27, 2002 George W. Bush amazed even his foes with his steady [...]

Not only did Bush have an ambitious, if highly focused, policy agenda when he came into office. He also believed deeply that success depended on strengthening the office of the presidency. That was at the core of his management style. While policies come and go, he understood that shifts in the institutional balance of power [...]

Both these strategies—rebalancing power with Congress and increasing leverage over the executive branch—came together in the president’s proposal for a new Department of Homeland Security. In the aftermath of September 11, critics argued that the administration had fumbled over key pieces of intelligence that might have alerted officials to the attacks. Calls arose almost immediately [...]

Team Bush reached out even more to tackle bureaucracy through an aggressive management agenda. The Clinton administration had attempted to “reinvent” government. Its downsizing movement, however, quickly stirred opposition among federal bureaucrats, and its effort to “empower” those officials never received much support in Congress. Bush decided on a different approach. Where the Clinton government [...]

A president not only has the daunting job of dealing with 535 members in the two houses of Congress, each of whom has a separate base of power; he must appoint the 650 top positions in the executive branch. And these officials in turn choose about 2500 other appointees—for more than 3000 political appointments in [...]

Team Bush sometimes played hardball in their relations with Congress, but sometimes they applied a deceptively deft and subtle touch. In December 2002, Republican Senator Trent Lott threw the Republican Party into turmoil by appearing to praise the segregationist legacy of Senator Strom Thurmond at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. For Bush, the turmoil that resulted [...]

John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel and no stranger to ruthless political maneuvering, noted, “This administration has been stiff-arming Congress.” On homeland security issues, the administration has been reluctant to give information to members of Congress, and even when the information was shared privately, the administration has refused to declassify it so legislators can [...]

Job One was dealing with Congress. Without a working relationship with legislators on Capitol Hill, Bush would be a lame duck before he had a chance to start. Republicans were anxious to move their long-stalled agenda—and to restore the heady days of the Reagan presidency. Democrats were wary of the new administration’s agenda items. With [...]

Bush was no stranger to such a job, however. Longtime Texas columnist and wag Molly Ivins noted that Texas has a “weak-governor” system. In fact, she argues, not only is the governor not the most powerful statewide official—the office ranks fifth, behind the lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, and land commissioner. Many observers would disagree [...]

George Bush and several talented people around him have made the White House a power center in ways that I haven’t seen in a long time—all the way back to Lyndon Johnson. That is a big statement. —Robert S. Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic Party and longtime presidential adviser In the past, those who [...]

If Bush imposes discipline on his staff and office, he does the same for his vacations. An August 2001 Washington Post survey found that Bush had spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots—or en route to them—including Camp David, his parents’ Kennebunkport, Maine, estate, or his Texas ranch. But those “vacations” have often [...]

The well-executed media leak is one of Washington’s most highly developed art forms. Every presidency has learned to feed bits of stories to reporters, disguised as comments by a “senior administration official” or “an official close to the president.” When a story is too hot for a leak from the White House, the administration will [...]

Bush avoided appointing ideologues to key jobs, with some exceptions—most notably Attorney General John Ashcroft. Given the strong support of the Republican right for his campaign, and the Republicans’ long exile during the Clinton years, that was no small feat. Leaders of the Religious Right and conservative Republicans pressed ideological true-believers on the Cheney-led transition [...]

All presidential administrations have problems keeping their team members in line. Sometimes it takes time for people to gel in their positions. Sometimes cabinet secretaries, who rarely are shrinking violets, speak out on issues they care about, even if their passions don’t match presidential policy. In a single week, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill suggested (in [...]

All presidents have strategies. All work hard to follow them. Success in executing them requires finding a way to quickly adapt existing strategies to new world events—to keep those events from pulling the manager away from the principal goals. For Bush, the key to adhering to his strategy and message lies in his relentless discipline. [...]

Bush exercises six days a week. Most of the time it’s running—outside, if he can manage it; inside, on a treadmill, if he can’t. On Camp David weekends, he runs a tough three-mile course in the morning before going on a two-mile walk with his wife afterward. If he doesn’t run, he uses an elliptical [...]