Cheney's plausible deniability explains Bush's incompetence as President

In the excerpts of Ron Suskind’s new book Mike Allen at Politico quotes a very interesting observation by Suskind, one that explains much of the incoherence and poor management that has characterized the Bush White House since day one. Allen quotes Suskind as saying about Dick Cheney:

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

--Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

Bush has frequently seemed lost and out of touch with reality. An excellent example was his videotaped reaction on 9/11 as he was notified that the second hijacked aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

Anyone who has watched that video of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to school children when he was notified is aware the Bush lost his nerve. It was all over his face. He was also very confused. He didn’t know which way to turn.

Upon leaving the school Bush retreated to his plane to fly to some safe location. According to an essay posted on History Commons:

"A journalist who said Bush was “flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare” and another who said Bush “skedaddled” were fired. [Washington Post, 9/29/01 (B)]"

The almost random flight out of Florida headed anywhere besides Washington, D.C. confirms those characterizations. They were threatening to the White House exactly because they were such accurate characterizations of Bush's indecisive behavior.

Bush left Sarasota, FL and headed first for Louisiana, then Nebraska as they tried to find the safest place for him to hide out. He had not only lost his nerve, he couldn't make a coherent decision regarding where to go or what to do. That indecisiveness is not surprising for a Chief Executive who is being protected from accountability by being kept in ignorance.

If Cheney was making the decisions and protecting Bush to give him "plausible deniability" it would mean that Bush wouldn’t dare to make a decision because the process of plausible deniability would mean Cheney was holding holding back critical relevant information from Bush. Bush would never know enough to make decisions! If Bush were to make an independent decision on his own, he could never be sure he wasn’t screwing up plans Cheney hadn’t told him about. The result is that only Dick Cheney could make decisions for Bush and for the nation.

So plausible deniability would protect Bush from accountability for the actions of his administration, but it would also mean that Bush himself would never have enough information about what was being done in his name to create a coherent administration policy.

Each of Bush’s subordinates would be left to operate on their own without the guidance and coordination that an overall strategy conducted by a knowledgeable and accountable strategic manager should have provided. Instead of focusing on their assigned jobs, each subordinate finds it necessary to build his own base of power and protect it from those around him. Only after establishing his individual base of power will Bush’s subordinates be in a position to try to accomplish his task.

While the idea of plausible deniability to protect the chief executive from being held accountable for the criminal actions of his subordinates sounds neat to someone with a Machiavellian attitude (like Cheney or Rumsfeld), withholding critical information from the chief executive means the CEO is not competent to perform his job. Instead of managing, Bush merely presides over a fiefdom of independent Barons in which each has his own base of power and has to fight with the others to protect or extend his personal power.

Another severe weakness of giving the Chief Executive plausible deniability is that it guts the separation of powers in the Constitution and shreds the Rule of Law.

This is not something that was done to Bush. It is something he has approved of. Bush clearly wants to imagine that by holding the office of President he is automatically a leader and can conduct his leadership by delegating the work to subordinates, it means he cannot hold subordinates responsible for what they each individually decide to do. Bush has never liked the hard work of administration and has no interest in it. So Cheney's plan to protect him through plausible deniability met a willing figurehead leader who was happy to cooperate.

Suskind's description of Cheney's decision to protect Bush from impeachment by "plausible deniability" really explains one major mechanism that has created the utterly incompetent Bush administration. It has happened because a lazy President chose a paranoid Machiavellian Vice President to guide him and to direct the functioning of the Federal Government while protecting Bush from accountability.