Eric Draper/White House/WireImage.com

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heckuva lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator." — George W. Bush, December 18, 2000

One morning in 2001, one of President Bush's most senior economic advisers walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the adviser had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates, he had called the president's chief of staff, Andy Card, to ask for the audience, and the meeting had been set.

As the man took his seat in the wing chair next to the president's desk, he began to explain his problem with the president's decision. The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy, this adviser was one of the experts, really top-drawer, and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts. He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president's position would soon enough be seen as "bad policy."

This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president.

According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. "I don't ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again," he said.

"What words, Mr. President?"

"Bad policy," President Bush said. "If I decide to do it, by definition it's good policy. I thought you got that."

The adviser was dismissed. The meeting was over.

It is one story among many such stories. Why, you might ask, would the president bother to have advisers who are expert in various constellations of policy-making if he then disregards utterly whatever they have to say? The answer is at the heart of the failure of this presidency.

George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush's part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues.

President Bush was unmoved by any arguments that challenged his assumptions. Debate was silenced, expertise was punished, and diversity of opinion was anathema, so much so that his political opponents — other earnest Americans who want the best for their country — were, to him and his men, the moral equivalent of the enemy. It is important to note just how different such conduct has been from the conduct of other presidents from both parties.

Anyone who has drawn this sad conclusion has been dismissed as a "Bush hater" by those who defend the president.

I am not a "Bush hater." I am a reporter, and it is incumbent in the enterprise to scrutinize power and follow facts.

I began chronicling this administration for Esquire in late 2001, and have been compelled to write about nothing else since. Among many other things, I learned that the bright lines typical in a White House between policy-making and political operations had been obliterated in the Bush White House, abandoned in favor of political calculations routed through Karl Rove's office. In his critique of this troubling power dynamic, one of my sources, the former director of the president's faith-based initiative, John DiIulio, called Rove's swarming operatives the "Mayberry Machiavellis." That was in 2002. DiIulio couldn't have known then just how right he was.

I also learned from another source, Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, that at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001, finding a rationale for overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein topped the agenda.

I learned that the president's message-makers derided the rest of us who live in the "reality-based community," as opposed to the alternate reality that they saw it in their power to create.

And most recently I learned that the White House was apprised by the Iraqi intelligence chief in January 2003 — well in advance of the war — that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no such active weapons programs. The intelligence chief, in his secret back-channel meetings, also described the mind of Saddam — his fear of the Iranians finding out he was weaponless — which explained his odd prewar behavior. When this fact was borne out after the invasion, the White House directed that a fraudulent document be created to establish a connection between the Iraqi regime and the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta. (This document miraculously materialized in Baghdad in December 2003.)

A common thread running through all of these discoveries is a basic misunderstanding of — or disregard for — the limits of presidential power. Indeed, this ahistoric president seems to have never appreciated just how hard-won are the institutions of American liberty. Article II of the United States Constitution grants stunning power to the president, power almost beyond imagining to be entrusted to one man. But for George Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn't enough. And so, with a level of secrecy that betrayed a basic mistrust of the American people, they proceeded to expand the awesome power of the presidency and in the process upset the balance of powers designed by the founders. And in this, the president and vice president found their greatest success. In fact, this presidency has succeeded spectacularly in the project that most mattered to Bush and Cheney, and that is putting the United States on a more authoritarian footing.

And with our fear being very carefully managed by our national leaders, and with President Bush exploiting our darker instincts, we in the press, in the Congress, in the electorate generally, simply weren't vigilant enough. And that is perhaps the best lesson to take away from the presidency of George W. Bush.

During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, Governor Bush spoke of dignity and humility in the conduct of the office, and of a more humble foreign policy that he intended to pursue if elected president. Of course, that was before the attacks of September 11, 2001, before the major threat of our time came into clear focus. But it is a paradox of this presidency that because Bush so outspent the treasury, and so exceeded his powers — in ways that have already been demonstrated by the courts to be illegal — and because he often seemed to use the prerogatives of his office not to protect the country but to protect himself, the next occupant of the office will actually find himself presiding over the more humble institution that Bush the candidate once described. That is the correction that is coming.

That is, if we are lucky. That is, if we have the will to restore the moral position that we have lost. That is, if our next president demonstrates the grace to show restraint in the exercise of his office. For the misshapen institution left by Bush is not so elastic as to snap back into the four corners of the Constitution easily, and restoring equilibrium and credibility to the presidency will require an act of will. After all, the test for a president isn't, How powerful can you be? Because presidential power is a given. The true test for the future of the American government is, Will the next president respect the institution enough to show self-restraint in the exercise of that power? Will Congress and the courts fight to recover the power that Bush has grabbed for himself? Will the next president negotiate new terms with the American people and with the world to repair the damage done?

Can we afford for him not to?

Without success in this mission, and swift success, this nation, this last best hope of mankind, will no longer be exceptional. It is Bush's legacy that he has handed his successor history's pitiless, ticking clock. =

Pulitzer-prize winner Ron Suskind's latest book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in the Age of Extremism, was recently published by HarperCollins.

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