The President

I’ve been thinking about President Bush the past few days while he has been mulling over his options in Iraq. Now I’m not particularly a Bush supporter. I think he and his team have been terribly naïve about the Middle East from the very beginning, and we are paying a terrible price for that naiveté. I am uncomfortable with the certainty his religious views give him on some subjects, and I don’t agree with some of his priorities. And I think he has been slow to recognize when a policy isn’t working.

Nonetheless, I feel for the President. It’s an impossible job. Most choices at that level are between the lesser of evils. Most choices have to be made on insufficient information. Most choices have a raft of unintended and unanticipated consequences. All the easy choices get made at lower levels – he only gets the really difficult problems. If he makes the correct choice, nobody notices and he gets little or no credit. If he chooses incorrectly, the whole world is ready to jump on him.

Nor is the Washington culture any help. As President Truman said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. For every decision there are a thousand partisan voices offering conflicting advice. For every decision, there are a thousand lobbyists and members of Congress pressing for their own agendas. For every decision there are crowds of media people just waiting to jump on the slightest misstep and blow it out of proportion into tomorrow’s headline.

It’s always easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but in fact the President, whoever he or she is, is the one on the hot seat every day and every night. World events move onward at their own rapid pace, prompt decisions have to be made, and the President doesn’t have the luxury of his critics to complain from the sidelines after the fact about what might have been or what should have been done. Being the leader of a nation this size, in a world this dangerous and complex, is a truly awesome task. I don’t always agree with the decisions our Presidents make, this president or any of his predecessors I have lived under, but I will always respect the difficulty of the office, and the difficulty of the decisions the man or woman in that office has to face.

It’s not a job I would want, and it’s probably not a job I could do. It has never been clear to me that I could have done any better in handling the Middle East problems. My mistakes would certainly have been different that President Bush’s, but I’m not sure the outcome would have been any better, and it might well have been much worse. That thought tempers my criticism, as it ought to temper some of the hasher of his critics.