Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess weighs in on the assessment that George W. Bush was ill-served by a small circle of people around him. I wrote about that today - noting that former East Texas Rep. Paul Sadler, who worked closely with Bush on education in the 1990s, worried when Bush went to Washington he would be swayed by "the voices in the room." Sadler has a keen sense of politics and his assessment that Bush might be susceptible to the Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove & Co. was prescient.
Fact is, says Stephen Hess of Brookings, many presidents fall prey to the blandishments and personal agendas of those around them. "All these people are sucking up to you and everything they say is how glorious you are. And you I think you fall back on these old friends because you an trust them. The really good ones know how to sort them out," he said in an interview.
As we reported today, former Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd believes the Bush White House was a place that rewarded likeminded thinking and discounted dissenting views. That trait has a name. It's called confirmation bias - the tendency to seek out information that reinforces your view and to disregard the rest. Dowd says it's why Cheney and Rumseld were so successful convincing Bush to invade Iraq based on selective, and erroneous, intelligence. They wanted to believe it was true, and their agenda was to make a case for war, whatever it took. Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out opinion you already agree with, is what's driving the cable talkers - Fox News and MSNBC.
Source: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/12/the-decider-bush-often-swayed.html
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