I was thinking about this on the train home, and I've decided that much of Bush's undoing wasn't him being stupid, but rather not being intellectually brave enough to surround himself with smarter people than himself.
It's fun to call Bush an idiot, and compared to many men who have been in the Oval Office he might be an idiot; but in any room of ten people at any given time filled with the people that voted for him cause he's "just like them," he's probably the smartest guy in the room. I mean, even as a legacy, even as a part of the super-elite upper-crust you can't float through Yale without having ANY brains. I assume he's smarter than me, which doesn't necessarily make you smart enough to run the country.
But Bush's problem was that he was just smart enough to know that he's not REALLY smart. Very smart people have a tendency to want to be around people as smart or smarter than themselves; kinda-smart people don't wanna spend all day being reminded they're not the smartest person in the room. So what happens? You sign up someone like Dick Cheney, who had pretty much been a failure at everything and lasted a month in an Ivy-league school some family friend got him into. Then you surround yourself with US Attorneys and Cabinet members et al who are simply thrilled to be there and have no problem nodding their head at everything you say. And before you know it, you're off and running to a terrible presidency. All because you're JUST smart enough to be threatened by really smart people.
I charge $500/hour for these little therapy sessions, by the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment