Confidence men: why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

• Author: Marshall, Joshua Micah

LET'S BE HONEST. AS UPSET AS YOU may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team. They had beaten a sitting vice president with seemingly every advantage; they outmuscled and outmaneuvered the Gore camp during the Florida recount; and despite the abbreviated transition, they quickly and smoothly assembled a seasoned White House staff. Many top appointees were in their second or third tour of government service; they exuded experience and know-how--and not just in the splendid isolation of academia or the permissive chaos of campaign work, but in the rugged practicalities of commanding American industry. Dick Cheney was the signature figure: a former White House chief of staff, congressman, and wartime defense secretary, whose vaunted government savvy had been validated in the private sector as CEO of the energy giant Halliburton. Like the administration, Cheney was right-wing, but in a way that was at once daunting and oddly reassuring. You may not have liked what he was doing. But you had little doubt that he knew what he was doing.

Today, that record doesn't look nearly so impressive. We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton's stock price plummeting, while signing off on dubious balance sheets that have sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. His mastery of the Beltway is similarly in question. Last year's Cheney-led energy task force produced an all-drilling-no-conservation energy bill that went nowhere. The task force's real legacy was to mire the administration in a thicket of congressional investigations and private lawsuits, all springing from Cheney's insistence on Nixonian secrecy. His major foreign policy gambit--last spring's shuttle-diplomacy mission to the Middle East to secure support for an invasion of Iraq--was a debacle. The tough-talking VP went to the region to line up the Arab states behind the United States against Saddam; days after Cheney's return they were lining up behind Saddam against the United States. Less well known, but no less embarrassing, was Cheney's leadership of the pre-9/11 anti-terrorism task force. In spring 2001, rather than back congressional efforts to implement the findings of the Hart-Rudman commission, Cheney opted to spearhead his own group, to put the administration's stamp on whatever reforms occurred. But the task force did almost nothing for four months until terrorists struck on September 11. More recently, it was Cheney who advised Bush not to include any serious corporate reforms in his July speech on Wall Street, the one that sent markets plunging. While no one bats a thousand in politics, it's actually difficult to think of one thing the vice president has been responsible for that has not ended in muddle or disaster. Yet his reputation for competence has survived.

The same applies to the Bush administration generally. After some early successes, like the tax cut and the education bill, most administration initiatives have gone nowhere. The White House's cocky bullheadedness turned Vermont Sen. Jira Jeffords into an Independent and gave the Democrats the Senate. Its budget predictions were in shreds well before September 11. Social Security privatization went bust long before the market did. During the California energy crisis, the administration refused for months to cap wholesale energy rates. This ill-advised move looked like payback to price-gouging energy firms like Enron and drove California even further beyond Republican reach, probably for years to come. Instead of disengaging from the Middle East peace process, as Bush had promised, he is ever more mired in its problems. When, predictably...