OT (politics)
The underlying problem was the willful determination not to explore options and really listen to dissenting views, from respected Republicans, including his own father, for God's sake.
Ever read anything in the management literature on Groupthink? The Bush administration, from what's been written about it and from looking from the outside and from listening to its statements about how it operates, is absolutely classic groupthink. When it's got the right trail, it might be quick and decisive, but once having stepped in a useless direction ... hard to save it from itself.
The big killer of the '04 campaign against him seemed to be that his opponents just could not explain what they would do. So it sounded like two people asking the public to have faith they would get it right in the future even though they could not explain to the public what the plan forward was. Result: GOP won on FUD.
At least, that's my take. Your comment on not listening to outside views certainly plays into why the Bush/43 administration gave us some of the experiences it did -- and the literature on groupthink is almost a battle plan for creating a Bush/43 administration. The problem is that rejecting all outside input castrates problem-solving by throttling what might be its most critical stage, the accumulation of diverse alternatives for comparison and evaluation.
The good news is that we will have oversight for at least two years. The bad news is that we don't know whether the oversight will be conducted and perceived as constructive or just more partisan bickering.
That's back to the spin machine. Who knows who will win that one. My concern is that members of Congress -- which enacts laws and is full of attorneys -- seemed to argue in the last election that its members had no idea their votes on Iraq authorizing force actually authorized force. They weren't passing a resolution condemning Iraq for something, they were responding to an executive request for authorization to use force. My conclusion is that a party that seriously claims this kind of BS isn't really going to be conducting oversight. I suspect the House will be conducting pre-'08 campaigning for the White House and the Senate, rather than serious oversight.
What we might get, though, is the death of some stupid bills that some GOP nuts think are good for the country and aren't. Honestly, I think a Congress that deadlocks on everything but two or three bills a year might be a huge victory for the electorate. So little of what Congress does is worthwhile; virtually all of it is susceptible to local regulation (and would be better regulated locally but for federal courts reading the Constitution to grant Congress powers that would have made its signers faint).
There really aren't too many people running for office who really understand or care how our government was designed and what parts have which jobs. It's a pity, and since the Cold War the problem has gotten seriously out of hand.
I'm not optimistic this trend will improve under any likely post-'08 scenario.
Take care,
--Tex.
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