From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
The Question of Competency
The problem with Gore's leadership style is that it's hands-on.
"Well, the hands-on guys haven't done very well," a college friend of mine remarked as Ronald Reagan was about to be inaugurated. He had the perspective of an engineer and business executive who'd taken a career break as a White House Fellow, and has since been promoted to the inside-director level of a huge multinational corporation. As we ponder today's candidates, it's worth remembering that the presidency is an executive position.
President Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer famous for keeping track of who used the White House tennis courts. Other recent presidents had included Richard Nixon, who thought he could use tape recordings to control every word uttered in the White House; Lyndon Johnson, micromanaging the Vietnam War and the Great Society; and John F. Kennedy, too clever by far in deciding to overthrow an ally, putting us in Vietnam irrevocably.
The Gipper was cut from a different cloth. "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance," he once quipped. In cocktail party chatter Clark Clifford, a Beltway doyen before the BCCI scandal, dismissed the president as "an amiable dunce." His biographer Lou Cannon sums up, "Reagan both began and ended his presidency as a popular leader who essentially pleaded no contest to the accusation that he failed to mind the store."
Yet somehow President Reagan resolved the economic malaise of the 1970s, set off an economic boom, restored the nation's spirit and won the Cold War. Because he didn't talk like a policy wonk, his detractors attribute his success to luck and historical inevitability. The secret is that precisely because he refused to get bogged down in detail, he was able to get the big things right. In the executive how-to manuals they call this "focus."
In today's political parlance, it also serves as "Teflon." If a president doesn't pretend to be on top of everything, he doesn't get the blame for every mistake. Ronald Reagan did not invent this technique. I remember Vermont Royster telling me that Reagan reminded him of covering Franklin D. Roosevelt: "He never knew what the hell was going on."
The true epitome of hands-off management was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who'd prepped for the presidency by running the invasion of Normandy. He cultivated the image of spending time on the golf course and spoke an English so impenetrable it must turn central bankers green with envy. Looking at this record, Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein was moved to write a book entitled "The Hidden-Hand Presidency," and Stephen Ambrose detailed these techniques in a two-volume biography. Geoffrey Parret, the latest biographer, says that Ike's success in both the military and politics has often been written off as sheer luck, "But the truth is, Eisenhower generated a lot of his own luck by anticipating events."
This history, of course, pertains to the current choice between Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush. There is a clear choice of ideologies, but also a huge difference in management styles, hands-on versus above the fray.
The vice president prides himself in comprehensive knowledge of policy detail, as almost an intellectual. In fact, his intellectual credentials are about as overwhelming as his vaunted debating skills proved to be. He once accomplished the extraordinary feat of pulling a D in a Harvard course, and he dropped out of both divinity school and law school. He did write a very silly book; I'm afraid he actually may believe it.
Gov. Bush was also a C student at Yale, but he did finish a Harvard MBA. Yet he has no intellectual pretensions; he's not even afraid to say he'd consult his advisers. He doesn't talk in terms of policy detail, but of general principles. The specific legislation can come later, in political give-and-take. He views his skill as bringing people together to get something done.
This difference in executive style showed up clearly in the presidential debates, and probably has had a lot to do with Gov. Bush's success in the post-debate polls. Yes, he showed that he was not dangerously ignorant of policy detail, and yes, he showed himself as more likeable. But more important, he projected an image of someone who could keep his eye on the main issue, someone you might trust to short his way through the complications that bedevil serious decisions in either business or politics.
Vice President Gore, by contrast, came across as someone preoccupied with, say, "the Dingell-Norwood bill," whatever that may be. His catalog of policy details sometimes has an idiot-savant flavor. He promises actually to expand Social Security and government medical insurance, start new entitlements for prescription drugs, universal pre-school, college tuitions and retirement savings, and shrink the government and retire the national debt all at the same time. As appealing as these promises may be, they are scarcely an example of setting priorities and making choices. If his magical "lock box" were purely cynical it would be one thing; the real danger is that he actually believes it.
Gore campaign chairman William Daley, his candidate behind in the polls, visited Washington last week to coordinate an offensive questioning Mr. Bush's competence for the presidency. In the New York Times, Sen. Bob Kerrey's contribution was, "When I hear him answer a question about the Middle East, I don't hear experience talking. I hear: 'I was a governor. I've got a vision. And I stick with my friends.' "
In tending to first principles, this already sounds like a better Middle East policy than the one we've got.
No one is ever prepared for the presidency, of course, and there can be no sure thing. But in terms of the kind of leadership needed, it seems to me Gov. Bush shows the right instincts and Vice President Gore all the wrong ones. And one more thing. With Al Gore you get what you see, a man fully formed by a lifetime in Washington. By contrast, Gov. Bush's progress in the three debates suggests he actually has a capacity for growth.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
