The Decline and Fall of the First MBA President
If nothing else, George W. Bush is an irony-producing machine. After all, the collapse of the American economy, perhaps the enduring legacy of Bush's tenure in the White House, was presided over by the man many once lauded as the nation's "first MBA President." Now with the Bush recession deepening into a crisis of historic proportions, "MBA President" has joined expressions like "mission to Mars", "weapons of mass destruction" and "we do not torture" among the cruel jokes of the Bush years.
It wasn't always this way. When he came to office, the Harvard Business School grad enjoyed the dual presumptions of managerial competence and mastery of the economy. Writing in USA Today, Walter Shapiro in 2002 praised Bush the administrator in glowing terms that seem comical - and tragic - in retrospect:
Few Democrats have faced up to the reality that Bush and his fellow Republicans know how to manage the government. Stephen Hess, a scholar of the presidency at the Brookings Institution, says, "This is the best-run White House since Eisenhower"...
...Our first MBA president grasps basic truths about how praise and simple thank-yous help build a cohesive team.
Writing for the oxymoronically-named American Thinker, fellow Harvard B-School product Thomas Lifson in 2004 fawned over "the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration" in a piece titled simply, "GWB: HBS MBA." In it, Lifson both attacked critics of Bush's gilded path to power ("There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then - Ambassador to China...could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a 'gentleman's C") and defended Bush's "poker player" mentality and decision-making style. In a piece repeatedly demonstrating a gift for fiction, Lifson offered this telling nugget:
"The very first lesson drummed - into new students, as they file into the classrooms of Aldrich Hall, is that management consists of decision - making under conditions of uncertainty...
...Better data would have been preferable, of course, but President Bush shows no sign of remorse for doing what he knows was the prudent thing under the circumstances."
Of course, even before the implosion on Wall Street, other voices started to question utility of Bush the Entrepreneur's MBA credentials. In 2007, Salon asked, "If the United States were a company, would George Bush be our CEO?" But a year prior to his disastrous invasion of Iraq and three years before the catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina, Time in 2002 ("Inside the Mind of the CEO President") puzzled over Bush's reaction to the rampant corporate corruption scandals battering the stock market:
But like Dad, he misjudges the nation's economy at his peril. Bush has shown a willingness to inject politics into some economic decisions...But faced with corporate scandals and a market meltdown, our first M.B.A. President hadn't found an easy remedy. He could draw from his own business defeats some empathy for the everyday victims of the current market malaise.
And to be sure, our first MBA President's business defeats were myriad. But unlike most entrepreneurs, George W. Bush as CEO always had someone to bail him out.
Consider the Bush family connections and all of the luck and good fortune that goes with it. Despites his failures as an oil man, Bush reaped one windfall after another. When Dubya ran afoul of the SEC for his insider trading while at Harken Energy, it was Bush family consigiliere James Baker and his friends at the law firm of Baker Botts who kept him out of legal hot water. And during the 2000 Florida recount, those same connections, and not his competence, made George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States.
But as this lamest of lame ducks faces an economic meltdown as his presidency winds down, there is no one to save him - or us. Unswerving in his current path - as HBS alum Lifson promised - Bush last week stuck to his failing business plan:
"History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much. Our aim should not be more government, it should be smarter government."
Bush's case of denial was hardly reassuring to either the markets or commentators. On Friday, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman worried that "it's scary to think how much more can go wrong before Inauguration Day." On Saturday, his colleague Gail Collins fretted that "we have an economy that's crashing and a vacuum at the top" and suggested Bush could make Thanksgiving "a really special holiday by resigning." By Sunday, Tom Friedman echoed that message ("just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let's swear in Barack Obama right now") and concluded of the toxic subprime mortgage securities poisoning the economy, "it is obvious that President Bush can't mobilize the tools to defuse them."
Back in 2006, an overlooked study by Duke University showed that more MBA students cheat than those pursuing other professions. The analysis of 5,300 students at 54 institutions found that 56% of MBA students acknowledged cheating, more than those in fields such as education (48%), social sciences (39%) or even law (45%). Apparently, it is our future business leaders, and not the GOP bogeymen the trial lawyers, that Americans should trust least. And to be sure, George W. Bush, America's putative first MBA president, is the poster boy for the country's most dishonest profession. (For more, see "Cheater in Chief.")
Mercifully, Americans don't hear much about the MBA president anymore. As the tragic tenure of George W. Bush revealed, it was an idea whose time never came.
Then again, some Republicans tell us, there's always 2012 and America's second MBA President, Mitt Romney.
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I fail to see the irony in a Harvard MBA wrecking the economy.
Posted by Barry Schwartz on November 23, 2008 4:18 PMI get a smile whenever I read the title of that blog "American Thinker". Its like Bush's Blue Skies Initiative, named in some perverse Orwellian doublespeak. It is interesting to go back and read the genuflecting prose with which Republicans greeted our MBA Prez. The same pundits which are now damning the hopes and aspirations that some Obama supporters have this presidency. If Obama is merely competent he'll look like a genius in comparison to Bush.
Posted by Adams on November 24, 2008 6:11 AM