U.S.: GWB, American president

When I was in T&T over the New Year's, the prevailing view of President George W. Bush was astonishingly negative. I attributed that to an over-reliance on news from the BBC and CNN. A good buddy of mine made the astonishing claim that "Bush is stupid, everybody knows that." Well, we mixed it up, fer sher. I was not about to let GWB go undefended.

I've been observing GWB since he declared his candidacy for the presidency. One thing I'm sure of, without ever seeing any academic record of his, is that GWB is one of the sharpest knives in the drawer. Former President Clinton had a reputation for being bright, but he was one of the stupidest presidents America had seen in a long while because his actions did not support his reputation for intellect. Even if he had a capacious knowledge of the issues, apart from the disaster of a tax hike in 1993, Clinton never managed to translate ideas into action, which is why his legislative successes came from the co-optation of Republican ideas.

In my estimation, GWB is one of the most brilliant strategists to cross the American political stage in a long while. Part of his brilliance is that he is, in part, an illusionist. GWB has played the American media so well that they are incapable of seeing him as he is. His malapropisms (GWB talks about being 'misunderestimated'), much-reported and mocked at, are, in my opinion, part of the illusion he has fostered so that the media, always inclined to regard Republican presidents as dumb, would be even more dimissive of this president himself. Why would he do that? The illusion leaves GWB free to achieve because no-one was expecting much from him.

A constant refrain through the first three years of the Bush presidency is that GWB has out-smarted the media and the Democrats. How was this possible? This was possible because in the eyes of both groups, GWB is a dummy; therefore, they set little or no expectations for him. Then, at every instance, GWB has run loops around both the media and the Democrats by posting solid achievements, thus driving both groups to an amazing fury and frenzy. (For this reason, the Democrats and the media, like the anti-war crowd and the Europeans, are actually joyful that no WMDs have been found in Iraq as of yet.) Therefore, when I see an event unfolding with GWB as the center, I wonder what he is doing and thinking. I query the objective he might have in mind. Take for instance the recent Air National Guard service issue. I wonder if how GWB played that was stategic and, if so, what purpose he was attempting to serve by allowing the issue to drag out. Where GWB is concerned, I take nothing for granted.

Anyway, for those out there who have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the Democrat meme that "Bush is stupid," they would do well to read GWB: HBS MBA.

President George W. Bush is the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from Harvard Business School, where postgraduate management training was invented in the early part of the last century, and which to many stands as a symbol of the good, the bad, and the ugly faces of modern management...

The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More importantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual perspectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a book. In other words, as the left never tires of claiming, he is too “stupid” to have picked up any tricks across the Charles River from Harvard Square.

This is patently incorrect. Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade.

There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-Ambassador to China, or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a “gentleman’s C.” I never, ever heard of a case of an incompetent student being allowed to graduate, simply because a certain family was prominent. On the contrary, I did hear stories of well-born students having to leave prior to graduation. The academic standards were a point of considerable pride.

An inability to learn and apply the lessons of the classroom and the voluminous nightly study materials, from regression analysis to strategy-formulation to marketing to human behavior in organizations, was simply not tolerated. Grading took place on a strict curve, and those who found themselves on the lower range of the curve in too many subjects hit the dreaded “screen” and had to supply convincing rationales to the Academic Performance Committee as to why they should be allowed to attend the second year of the program, much less graduate. The screen was a vital component of the HBS quality assurance program, itself an essential method of protecting the value of the school’s MBA “brand.” Harvard Business School would no sooner voluntarily graduate an incompetent MBA holder than Coca Cola would ship-out bottles containing dead mice.
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Harvard Business School background does not derive from the classroom, per se. One feature of life there is that a subculture of poker players exists. Poker is a natural fit with the inclinations, talents, and skills of many future entrepreneurs. A close reading of the odds, combined with the ability to out-psych the opposition, leads to capital accumulation in many fields, aside from the poker table.

By reputation, the President was a very avid and skillful poker player when he was an MBA student. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand.  This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically.