The truth is that I don't give a good goddamn about Bush the man. Just to get it out of my system, though, here's what I think of him.

I don't think, as many on the Left seem to, that he's an idiot. I don't think he's Dick Chaney's puppet, or Karl Rove's.

I do think he's in over his head.

I do think he lacks compassion, empathy, foresight, and the capacity for self-reflection.

I sometimes think that he really has been Born Again.

I sometimes think he's a ruthless cynic who's happy to use the religious right to get elected, because he's safe in the knowledge that none of their policies will really affect on him or his friends.

I think (having worked for the sort of people she's talking about) that Teresa Nielsen Hayden's analysis of his psychology is the most plausible I've heard so far.

And I don't think he gives a damn what I think.

If you find this to be at odds with my previously expressed opinions, it's possible that I communicated badly — for which I apologize — and possible that I've changed my mind — for which I don't.

But none of that is what I care about. What I care about is who he surrounds himself with. What I care about is his policies. What I care about is that he and his team have made a dog's breakfast of everything from education reform to Medicare reform to trade policy to fiscal policy to homeland security to counterterrorism (without even getting into his Iraq policy, something that not even a dog would eat).

I'm not even talking about their goals. I'm talking about their approach to achieving them. You don't fix public education by forcing school districts to divert even more resources from teaching to administrative compliance with federal regulations. You don't fix Medicare by setting up a complicated drug plan that no one understands and that actually costs the government more money than what it was replacing. You don't encourage free trade by violating trade agreements to scrounge for votes in steel country and pick fights with the Canadian lumber industry. You don't stimulate an economy with an oversupply problem by cutting taxes on investment income. You don't protect the country by cutting funding for first responders and wasting money to keep nail clippers off airplanes. You don't deny terrorists a safe haven by turning the country that supported them over to anarchy and warlordism. (And you don't take over a large and well-armed country by firing your chief of staff for requesting too many troops, ignoring the State Department's area experts, staffing your viceregal regime with campaign contributors and unqualified kids vetted by the Heritage Foundation, and letting the Defense Department and the CIA fight it out over whether the strongman you prop up is going to be a crook or a spook. But I'm trying not to talk about that.)

What I care about is that Bush broken his most important campaign promise. His most important campaign promise was that it didn't matter whether he was an expert, because he would surround himself with the country's best experts and take their advice. He promised that if there was a foreign policy crisis, he'd listen to Colin Powell, and if there was an economic crisis, he'd listen to Alan Greenspan. Instead he listened to Donald Rumsfeld and Larry Lindsey, and managed to screw up both crises six ways from Sunday.

I'll admit it: There's really not much chance I would have voted for even a competent Republican president. The best the GOP could hope for is that they'd run someone like, oh, take your pick: Colin Powell, William Weld, Rudy Giuliani — and the Democrats would run someone like Dick Gephardt or Dianne Feinstein. That might get me to abstain.

But if I were a conservative (a real conservative, I mean, not some premillenial dispensationalist with a Scofield Reference Bible in one hand and a Gary North tract in the other) I still wouldn't be able to vote for this guy. I know what a competent Republican administration would look like, and this isn't it. Even if I agreed with Bush's stated policies, he's the last one I'd want as their standardbearer. If I were a conservative, my biggest worry wouldn't be a Kerry presidency, it would be that the incompetence of the Bush crew was going to do the kind of damage to the national Republican party that Pete Wilson did to the Republican party in California, casting them out into the wilderness for a political generation and casting their policies out even longer.

And if I were not just a conservative, but a secular conservative, I'd wonder how long Bush can keep giving the religious right half of what they want — before what's left is too small to cut in half.

---

Update:

• “One Hundred Facts and One Opinion.” I wish I'd had this in front of me while I was writing the catalogue above.
• In case you haven't already seen it: “Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda” This is why Bill Clinton wasn't kidding.

---

Update: Oops. I do know Larry Lindsey from Larry Summers.