Job Performance Review of George Walker Bush, President of the United States

When Charles Gibson of ABC News interviewed President George Bush, he said that he would leave office with his head held high. Let us compare his actual job performance with his neoconservative self image.

In 2000, Presidential-candidate George W. Bush paradoxically sought our votes so that he could become a part of the very problem that he ran against. Many of us remember his smirk as he assured us that government was not the solution. "Government," he said, "is the problem."

After his inauguration, he approved a tax cut that benefited the upper one-percent of American income earners. About the tax cut, Vice President Cheney said, "It is our due." The tax cut also reduced government revenues. Since he had to be careful about government expenditures, President Bush virtually eliminated such problems as regulating the stock market, the real estate industry, and American banks. He saw to it that food producers and drug manufacturers were no longer burdened by questions about sanitation and safety.

President Bush thought all government regulation obstructed the free market. So, for the next six years a hands-off government was in partnership with business, and the free market became a profitable bazaar of E-coli-ridden vegetables, ineffective and harmful drugs and vaccines, as well as poisonous baby bottles and tainted baby food. Hucksters in the free market bundled mortgages together and peddled them as securities based on formulae so complex that few mathematicians could decipher them. Free enterprise flourished, and the stock market averages soared to record highs. Corporate executives made huge bonuses. The neoconservative ideology appeared to be working.

But reality kept infringing on his neoconservative ideology. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans while President Bush was chopping cedar on his ranch. His choice for FEMA director, Michael Brown, had been a lawyer with little or no experience handling emergencies. In spite of three days’ notice about Hurricane Katrina’s severity, Brown ordered no staging areas for relief supplies and manpower, contacted no state or local officials from the endangered area. The total lack of coordination among government agencies led to chaos. City, state and federal officials worked against each other’s best interests. Food and medical supplies were delivered to the wrong locations, if delivered at all. In fact, some supplies were not allowed to enter the disaster zone. Corpses floated in flooded streets or were wrapped in plastic garbage bags with notes pleading the finder to dispose of the remains with tenderness and efficiency. The survivors got neither. The final tally of the dead and missing was over 2,500.

Another reality that infringed on President Bush’s ideology is the Iraq war. Bush, who called himself "The Decider," created his own solution to the attack on the World Trade Center. He decided to make war on Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator who had helped the Al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on September 11, 2001. He also decided to destroy Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and free oppressed Iraqis who would welcome Americans as liberators.

However, while President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Rice were planning the invasion, US government intelligence contradicted not only Hussein’s complicity in 9/11, but also the presence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But that information wasn’t what President Bush wanted. He wanted an enemy, and the government intelligence services could not show that Hussein was part of the axis of evil.

So, once again, President Bush decided that government was the problem and rejected the intelligence. He then told pliant and dependable political appointees what he needed to make a case for an invasion. They fabricated evidence to support Bush’s desire for war. Secretary of State Powell characterized that evidence as "bullshit," but National Security Advisor Rice told her fellow Americans that she did not want the smoking gun of Hussein’s guilt to be a mushroom-shaped cloud.

To protect themselves from more problems, Bush and his subordinates fired intelligence agents and generals who did not agree with them. Vice President Cheney told his countrymen that if we did not agree with the Bush administration, we did not love our country. So, we invaded with an army lacking body armor, adequate water supplies, and transportation equipment that was vulnerable to improvised explosive devices.

Since then, over 4,200 American troops have died, and almost 31,000 have been wounded. These patriots have been poorly cared for in understaffed, poorly equipped hospitals. Despite their sacrifices, the armed forces have found no weapons of mass destruction. They found no welcoming Iraqis. Despite our capture of Saddam Hussein and his execution by Iraqis, Americans have alienated not only most of the population of Iraq but also most of our allies.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney believe government is the problem, and the law of the land doesn’t apply to neoconservatives.. So they ignored the Geneva Convention, a treaty approved by Congress, which states, "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." So they approved the torture of many prisoners of war and innocent civilians. Although President Bush and Vice President claim that they have gained valuable information from tortured prisoners, they are no closer to finding Osama bin Laden than we were in 2001 when his operatives successfully leveled the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Our troops’ presence in Iraq will end in 2010. By that time we will have spent almost a trillion un-budgeted dollars on the conflict, which was supposed to be paid for by the sale of Iraqi oil, much of which went up in smoke as the result of the war and sabotage. Another large part of it disappeared into the thriving black market. We also lost shrink-wrapped bundles of 100-dollar bills worth $12 billion which were shipped to Iraq in C-130 transports. That cash simply vanished with no record of who got it or what it was spent on.

None of the above speaks well for the Harvard Business School that granted President Bush an MBA in 1975. Five years before that, graduates of HBS were taken to task by Robert Townsend in his best-selling book Up the Organization.

Don’t hire Harvard Business School graduates. This worthy enterprise confesses that it trains its students for only three positions—executive vice president, president, and board chairman. The faculty does not blush when HBS is called the West Point of capitalism.

By design, the "B-School" trains a senior officer class, the non-playing Captains of Industry. People, who, upon graduation, are given a whirlwind tour of their chosen company and then an office and a secretary and some work to do while they wait for one of the top three slots to open up.

This elite, in my opinion, is missing some pretty fundamental requirements for success: humility, respect for people on the firing line; deep understanding of the business and the kind of people who can enjoy themselves making it prosper; respect from way down the line; a demonstrated record of guts, industry, loyalty, judgement, fairness, and honesty under pressure.

Townsend’s ideas apply equally to George W. Bush and the citizens of the United States that hired him. To Bush who misses the very requirements for success listed in the last paragraph. To us, his employers who did not look for those requirements in George W. Bush. As a result, Bush may leave office with his head held high, but we will have the task of healing the wounded, sheltering the homeless, feeding the poor, and clothing the naked that his neoconservative delusions left behind.