Is Leadership in the Details?

By Joe Klein

There's a telling anecdote in David Frum's new memoir of his year as a White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. Early in the presidency, Frum--who later received credit for the deathless, and perhaps senseless, phrase "axis of evil"--submits a speech. The President eviscerates it. Frum asks why. "The material he had hacked out," Frum writes, "seemed to me the headline story of the event. Bush shook his head at me. The Headline is: BUSH LEADS."

This is meant to seem admirable. And it is, in a way, I suppose. Before Bush, leadership had fallen out of favor as a political strategy. Followship was all the rage: follow the polls, follow the focus groups, follow your consultants. "Leadership," wrote Dick Morris, the Iago of the Clinton era, "is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go." And guess who usually wins that tug-of-war? (Actually, it's neither the voters nor the politician; it's the consultant who massages the data and advises, "Be careful, Mr. President. Try something bite-size.") So it has been fun to watch Young Bush fly in the face of the mingy, tactical, peripheral politics of recent years--to run a very different sort of presidency from Old Bush or Bill Clinton, to propose wildly ambitious and blatantly ideological and extremely risky policies, to "overload the system with new ideas," as one Republican told me last week. "Karl Rove is telling people this is 'the second hundred days,' but it's even more ambitious than that," he added. "The strategy is total domination. Don't let the Congress up for air." The word of the hour in Washington is bold. Bush has proposed a bold new tax cut. He hasn't backed down from his list of conservative judges. And, perhaps boldest of all, he wants a market-oriented reform of Medicare--and a reform of malpractice insurance too. Headline: BUSH LEADS.

But wait a minute. Let's go back to Frum's anecdote; a metaphor may lurk within. Frum doesn't say what the speech was about, and he doesn't specify what Bush cut from the text--this is only a tell-some memoir. But one can assume that Bush has cut the details of the policy. And that fits too: there has been a vaporous quality to Bush's boldness. He traffics in headlines. The policies themselves are often not entirely baked. A case in point: Frum's "axis of evil" and its accompanying doctrine of pre-emption, which Bush announced at West Point last June and discarded in Korea this January. The revised doctrine: Caveat Pre-Emptors. We have the moral responsibility to pre-empt evildoers...unless they have the ability to empt back (as North Korea does). This is an embarrassment, and a rather dangerous one at that. There should be a lesson in it for the President. A diplomacy of quiet strength and careful words, and the rigorous parsing of nuances--the latter, a word the President is said to despise--is the only way for a grown-up superpower to behave.

Bush's domestic policy has followed a different pattern: bait and switch. The President proposes (grandly), and his budget office disposes (stealthily). He and Ted Kennedy steered what seemed a massive $29.2 billion education-reform bill through Congress, and then Bush decided to spend only $22.1 billion of it, which was less than he had been spending before the extravagantly titled Leave No Child Behind Act was passed. He created a new bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security--with no new money to fund the cops, fire fighters and emergency workers who secure the homeland. These are bumper stickers, not policies. Tax cuts, by contrast, are real; they get passed, fully "funded." They constitute the defining--perhaps the only substantive--domestic policy of this presidency.

So BUSH LEADS turns out to be as much a political strategy as it is a governing philosophy. As the man said, "Total domination." It's more compelling than the defensive crouch of the eentsy, whiney Democrats. But how sad: this is a moment when actual leadership might be preferable to sadomasochism. And sadder still: many of Bush's ideas are the right ones and might warrant serious attention from a Senate filled with many more moderates than the last. Medicare needs reform, desperately, and so does malpractice insurance. A change in the way corporate profits are taxed might make some sense too. But the Democrats are feeling burned--they have been baited and switched twice too often, and the double reduction of taxes on the wealthy (marginal rates and dividend interest) was probably a cut too far even for some Republicans. Legislation, like diplomacy, requires a softer tone.

There wasn't a single "bold" initiative proposed during the last six years of Bill Clinton's presidency, after the Republicans took control of the Congress. This was an unambiguous failure on Clinton's part. But each year, he battled the opposition line by line through the budget. Over time, he won hundreds of millions, sometimes many billions, more for the programs he thought useful. There were few headlines. The money mostly went to the working poor. That was leadership too. It seems the precise opposite of what we are seeing now.