Falling Stock
George Bush wants to run his presidency like a business, but critics say the bottom line is not encouraging
As he toured the seemingly endless rows of houses flattened by Hurricane Katrina in Gautier, Miss., something caught President Bush's eye. He leaned down and picked up from the debris what turned out to be a wedding photograph of a young couple and their family. "This is what it's all about," Bush told an aide. "So many emotions and history got lost here." Yet Bush said the picture gave him a sense that, somehow, life would go on, and things would eventually get back to normal. "You can't be president and always be down," Bush observed later.
That kind of optimism is part of Bush's character. It's also part of the larger code of the chief executive officer by which he governs. "He is an M.B.A. president," says Carolyn Thompson, coauthor of The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush. "He is doing a bunch of things that he would do if he ran Chrysler or Joe's Pizza." He sets the goals. He surrounds himself with loyalists. He delegates large amounts of responsibility. He is disciplined in working toward his objectives and in explaining them to the public.
Yet Bush's CEO presidency has fallen on hard times. Over the past year, he has endured two management disasters that undermined public faith in his competence: his administration's weak response to Hurricane Katrina, which erased his image as a strong leader, and its botched effort at persuading Congress to accept a deal authorizing a Dubai-owned company to operate six U.S. seaports. In these cases, he seems to have delegated too much authority, lost track of what was happening, and failed to ask the right questions. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card refused to "point fingers" but said Bush is correcting what went wrong and the administration will do better in the future.
The war with Iraq provides another example of how his CEO style has gone off track. After Bush decided to invade, he ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon to carry out the mission as they saw fit. Critics fault Bush for blindly following the recommendations of Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney and not sending enough troops to Iraq at the outset of the war, and then underestimating the strength of the anti-American insurgency. "It's a classic problem of a CEO adopting a preconceived plan and failing to modify it to deal with reality," says a former White House adviser to Bush's father, George H. W. Bush.
Staying the course. More than 60 percent of Americans now say the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to the latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, and 58 percent disapprove of Bush's job performance. He has begun an aggressive PR campaign to boost support for the war, which is the biggest drag on his presidency, and is considering adding a veteran Washington insider to bolster his staff.
Despite the problems, Bush is hanging tough. "I have not seen a change in the president's leadership style and the management tools he uses," Card told U.S. News. Card and other Bush confidants say the chief executive is applying the hands-off style he learned at Harvard Business School, where he earned a master's degree in business administration in 1975, and also the methods that worked for him as an oilman, as managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and, later, as governor of Texas.
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