From a pampered son who showed little promise, to his rise to the presidency, George W. Bush has transformed himself through acts of will and faith. Stanley Renshon examines the psychological transformation of Bush and identifies those pivotal changes that allowed him to achieve success in his personal life and in the political arena, and shows how Bush's personal transformation has come to shape his political policies. The man who battled--and defeated--his own inner demons has become a president determined to battle the demons of terrorism and extremism that prevent democracy from flourishing around the world. This psychological portrait provides a much-needed antidote to prevailing critiques that ridicule Bush's values and policies, as it celebrates his resolve and strong leadership.
From a pampered son who showed little promise, to his rise to the presidency, George W. Bush has transformed himself through acts of will and faith. Stanley Renshon examines the psychological transformation of Bush and identifies those pivotal changes that allowed him to achieve success in his personal life and in the political arena, and shows how Bush's personal transformation has come to shape his political policies. The man who battled--and defeated--his own inner demons has become a president determined to battle the demons of terrorism and extremism that prevent democracy from flourishing around the world. This psychological portrait provides a much-needed antidote to prevailing critiques that ridicule Bush's values and policies, as it celebrates his resolve and strong leadership.
In His Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush
321
In His Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush
321eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
From a pampered son who showed little promise, to his rise to the presidency, George W. Bush has transformed himself through acts of will and faith. Stanley Renshon examines the psychological transformation of Bush and identifies those pivotal changes that allowed him to achieve success in his personal life and in the political arena, and shows how Bush's personal transformation has come to shape his political policies. The man who battled--and defeated--his own inner demons has become a president determined to battle the demons of terrorism and extremism that prevent democracy from flourishing around the world. This psychological portrait provides a much-needed antidote to prevailing critiques that ridicule Bush's values and policies, as it celebrates his resolve and strong leadership.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466892071 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 321 |
| File size: | 900 KB |
About the Author
Stanley A. Renshon is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Psychology Program, City University of New York Graduate Center, a certified psychoanalyst, and an award-winning author.
Read an Excerpt
In His Father's Shadow
The Transformations of George W. Bush
By Stanley A. Renshon
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2004 Stanley A. RenshonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9207-1
CHAPTER 1
A HISTORIC AND CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENT
The English historian Thomas Carlyle wrote that "all of history is the biography of great men." In this he was surely mistaken. All leaders, even great ones, govern in a set of circumstances that precedes them. What's more, they must deal with circumstances as they develop, rather than as they wish them to be.
Biography and psychology are important because they reflect the experiences, motivations, and skills that a leader brings with them as they navigate an uncertain environment they cannot completely control. Personal psychology cannot dictate historical circumstances, but it can alter them. Moreover, the same circumstances may elicit different responses depending on the psychology of the leader. George W. Bush's response to 9/11, "This is war," was neither obvious nor necessary. Different people will react differently to the same event or situation. These different reactions have important implications for the president and the public he leads.
KEY ELEMENTS OF THE BUSH PRESIDENCY
The analysis of every presidency remains a story with four key parts. The first is the president himself. It is his ambitions, his judgments, and his skills that set his presidency in motion and guide it, for better or worse, as it unfolds.
Psychology and Leadership
Mr. Bush may have a transparent psychology, but it is at the same time an unusual one, especially compared to his predecessor. Mr. Clinton disliked and avoided conflict. Mr. Bush certainly does not avoid it. Many asked whether Mr. Clinton had any real principles; some ask of Mr. Bush whether his have sufficient flexibility.
Mr. Clinton was one of the smartest and most knowledgeable of the modern presidents. However, his intelligence was often trumped, to his disadvantage, by his psychology. Mr. Bush faces a different and almost opposite set of questions. Is he smart enough? Is he curious enough to ask difficult questions of his staff? Does he delegate too much decision-making? Are his decisions essentially those of his chief advisors, perhaps Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney?
These questions and others about Mr. Bush's psychology and leadership are likely to be at the forefront of the 2004 presidential campaign. They are certainly at the center of his presidency. And they are a critical part of any assessment of Mr. Bush and his presidency for 2004 and beyond.
The Presidency's Circumstances
The second key element of any presidency is its particular historical and political context. Presidents may try to shape events, but they cannot escape them. Whether and how the president responds to his circumstances tells us a great deal about the man who occupies that office.
Consider the economic circumstances that faced the Bush presidency on taking office. The economy began to slow and subsequent data showed that it had slipped into a recession, formally defined as two successive quarters of negative growth. Mr. Bush touted his tax cuts as a remedy and passed three of them. Consumer spending, one strong element in an otherwise faltering economy, was apparently helped by the infusion of tax rebates, and by the second quarter of 2003 the economy had begun to pick up steam.
These tax cut bills were highly contentious and their effects questioned. However, it cannot be said that Mr. Bush awaited the upturns that the economic cycle might eventually bring. I don't know if Mr. Bush is familiar with Richard Neustadt's classic analysis of Presidential Power and the critical need for presidential self-help, but he acts as if he is.
Consider another example. Mr. Bush was at an elementary school in Florida when he received news that a first, and then a second, plane had struck the World Trade Towers. His first response, recorded by several of those present, was "This is war." There are many other possible responses Mr. Bush might have had, but didn't. As a result, his presidency and life in America profoundly changed. Later I will look more closely at this judgment, noting here only that Mr. Bush's response underlines the importance of focusing on how a president responds to circumstances and not just the fact that they need to do so.
The President's Office
The third key element is the institution of the presidency itself. The office of the presidency, and its powers, provide the instruments for leadership and the realization of the president's policy ambitions. Here, as in the case of the president's response to circumstances, if a president uses the powers of his office, and how he does so, tell us important things about a president, his skills, ambitions, and prospects.
Mr. Bush has not been shy about using the powers of his office. These powers go well beyond "setting the agenda" or the capacity to "go public" in an attempt to pressure Congress. Those powers include presidential orders, directives to his chief operational agencies, appointment powers, using the machinery of party majorities in the Congress, giving or shielding information, and the basis for congressional partnerships with the White House. Internationally, they include committing troops and resources, forging initiatives, redefining partnerships, reframing treaties, and reassessing priorities. Mr. Bush has used all of these, as well as others.
Mr. Bush entered a presidency whose power had contracted in recent years. He sought to reverse that trend even before 9/11 and provided a strong rationale and set of tools to do so. His action ignited charges that Mr. Bush had rekindled the "imperial presidency." Whether and to what extent that is true is certainly relevant to any assessment of the Bush presidency.
Public Psychology
Finally, the fourth critical aspect of a presidency is the public's psychology—its views, attachments, and feelings. Just as a president comes into office with a particular party line up in Congress, and a particular set of nine people on the Supreme Court, so he begins by inheriting an already formed public psychology. This means that he starts out dealing with the public's expectations; their recent experiences as well as what they can recall of their historical ones; their hopes and fears; and their understandings of their circumstances.
Sometimes a president bends in the direction of public psychology, telling the public what it says it wants to hear, even if the president doesn't believe it or isn't doing it. "The era of the big government is over," said President Clinton in a State of the Union message that listed copious numbers of new governmental initiatives. "Watch what we do, not what we say," said Nixon's chief of staff Bob Haldeman. Mr. Bush has proved to be very different.
A president must decide how he will respond to the public psychology he faces upon entering office. He can accept it as an immutable given and adapt his agenda to it. He can pretend to accept it, as he tries to finesse or work around it. Or, he can, like George W. Bush, try to change it by example and policy.
Yet, it is also true that the president also brings to his time in office his own psychology. Therefore, an important but rarely asked question is how good the fit is between the two psychologies. Given Mr. Bush's ambitions to transform American domestic policy culture—and after 9/11, America's stance in the world—this fit has become a pressing question.
Americans have traditionally been multilateralists when they have not championed isolationism. Mr. Bush entered office with a feeling of reservation, bordering on skepticism, that agreements themselves were the key to national security; 9/11 did nothing to change his view. But Americans are ambivalent about going it alone, even when necessary. In this area, as in others, the president's ambitions meet the public's psychology, and it is an open question as to whether the public will follow the president's lead or even be able to tolerate it.
A VERY CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENCY—WHY?
George W. Bush is a controversial president and even if reelected is likely to remain so. It is worth asking why. His critics believe the reasons are obvious. Mr. Bush, they say, can never escape the taint of being put into office by the Supreme Court despite clearly losing the popular vote. Moreover, they say, he lied when he pledged he would be the "president of all Americans." Instead, he has disregarded any pretense of bipartisanship and governed as if he had earned a mandate.
In office, critics argue, he has proved to be a rigid ideologue masking his hard-right agenda behind the thin veneer of a meaningless term—"compassionate conservatism." Domestically, his critics say, he favors only the wealthy and is committed to "turning back the clock" on all the hard-won policy advances of minorities, workers, immigrants, environmentalists, and women. Internationally, they argue, he has turned his back on the world community and its commitment to the rule of law as evidenced by his negation of the Kyoto Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Worse, he has abandoned deterrence, the cornerstone of American security for 50 years, to pursue his unilateralist doctrine of preemption. In the process, he has turned world opinion and our traditional allies against us. Americans are less safe, and government policies are less fair as a result, say his critics.
The president is openly disparaged by many in the Democratic Party and self-described "progressive" policy circles. People with these views are routinely found in America's political institutions, media venues of all kinds, and in the myriad policy advocacy communities. Indeed, the rage about Mr. Bush has been an important emotional and strategic element in critics' mobilization against the administration for the 2004 presidential election.
Critics, and this includes senior Democratic party politicians, openly express their harsh judgments of the president's integrity, competence, and intelligence. He has been called an "idiot," a "fraud," a danger to the republic, and a "miserable failure." Pundits have been even less restrained, comparing him to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, calling him a "madman," a "war criminal," one of the worst presidents in American history, and a president dedicated to the "intentional destruction of the United States of America." Not surprisingly, some Democrats have introduced a resolution to impeach him.
Mr. Bush may be one of the few presidents about whom symposiums have been held and articles written on the hatred he has engendered. In one of these, entitled "The Case for Bush Hatred," Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic, wrote:
I hate President George W. Bush. ... I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. ... And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
If one were to summarize the critics' views, they would be that Mr. Bush is an arrogant dimwit who is in over his head in complex policy matters and thus dependent on a small group of right-wing domestic advisors and their neo-con counterparts in foreign policy. They see him as a president who has turned his back on the bipartisan domestic and international policy consensus of the last four decades, and in so doing has put this country at risk of losing its many benefits.
Obviously, my evaluation of the Bush presidency will have to assess these claims; however, it is not too early to underscore that the reality of the George W. Bush presidency is much more complex and interesting than the shallow caricature drawn by many of his critics. It is true that Mr. Bush has turned away from a number of domestic and international policy orthodoxies. Yet this is precisely what one would expect of a transforming president. Indeed, it is difficult to see that such a project could be accomplished without stepping away from "conventional wisdom."
The president's attempts to change the way Americans view the world has led him to take some controversial policy steps. Americans have always felt strongly that they are entitled to fight back when attacked. Yet, what should be done when fighting back after an attack may result in tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of American deaths in their homes and workplaces? Do you attack first? On what basis? These are questions that have only recently come into focus for Americans, and answers are by no means settled in the public's mind. They are, however, settled in Mr. Bush's. In this area, as in others where Mr. Bush has proposed significant policy changes, Americans are caught between new circumstances, old policy paradigms, unanswered questions, and a confident, determined president. This is a major, but by no means the only, reason that Mr. Bush is so controversial.
Americans: Divided not Polarized
Contemporary American politics seems to be the political equivalent of "the perfect storm." It is raked by a number of turbulent elements, each of which by itself would be challenge enough for a president with strong policy aspirations. Together, they have created the political equivalent of a nationwide typhoon. The question is: What kind of captain is Mr. Bush?
The primary fissures in American politics are variously described as cultural or political. In reality, they are both. Unlike America's first Civil War, the cultural wars that began in the mid-1960s did not pit commerce against agriculture, urban centers against rural traditions, or North against South. Rather, the culture wars are being waged in every section of the country.
Unlike the first Civil War, contemporary combatants cannot take refuge in the primary institutions in their part of the country—their families, or their religious, social, cultural, or political organizations. These are precisely the places where the second Civil War conflicts are being fought.
In reality, of course, there are many such wars. There are the abortion wars, school wars, military culture wars, gender wars, family wars, history wars, marriage wars, museum wars, and classics wars, and as well as wars over flags, statues, pledges (of allegiance at school, to our country during naturalization ceremonies), and traditional holidays like Mother's Day (which is said to exclude children with gay parents). The consequences of these wars are not to be found in the number of killed or wounded. Rather, they are to be found primarily in the retreat from common ideals; basic cultural values abandoned, atrophied, or under siege; and institutions floundering in a stormy sea of shrill and conflicting demands.
Advocacy campaigns against every major American cultural and political institution are not the result of a groundswell of American public sentiment. They are the result of groups of determined activists, and their allies, amplifying their positions through media strategies in an attempt to engineer what they see as necessary changes in American cultural institutions. The result is a series of institutions under siege and cultural foundations undermined.
At the same time, Americans have become more politically divided. Some of this has to do with the cultural battles that have made their way into politics—gay marriage rights would be one example. Others are plain old vanilla policy differences. Both, however, appear to have a growing geographical dimension.
This divide is most starkly framed by the famous "red and blue" map of the 2000 election vote. Looking at the blue states that Al Gore won and the red states that George W. Bush won, Terry Teachout argues, "Except for Alaska and New Hampshire, all 29 states won decisively by Bush are geographically contiguous, forming a vast L-shaped curve that sweeps down from the Rocky Mountains across the Great Plains, then through the Midwest and the South. By contrast, except for California and Washington, most of the states won decisively by Gore are bunched tightly around the urban and industrial centers of the Northeast and Great Lakes."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In His Father's Shadow by Stanley A. Renshon. Copyright © 2004 Stanley A. Renshon. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Understanding the George W. Bush Presidency * A Framework for Analysis * A Historic and Controversial President * Searching For His Place * In His Father's Shadow * George W. Bush: Character and Psychology * The President's Character * Character's Tools: The President's Psychology * President Bush: Judgement and Leadership * George W. Bush: Good Judgement or Cowboy Politics * The Second Transformation: George W. Bush and the Nine Eleven Presidency * Principles in Practice: George W. Bush's Presidential Leadership * Transforming America/Transforming the World * The Politics of Transformation * A Transforming President in Perspective * The Dilemmas of a Transforming President