Good Judgment Is a Lifetime Task

George W. Bush’s performances in the Republican presidential debates have been unnerving, even for some of us sympathetic to his ideas and impressed by his campaign. It’s not that he has made any gaffes or blunders. He hasn’t, even when asked brain-teaser-type questions about Tier II air pollutants.

And it is not that he caves when challenged. When Gary L. Bauer asked him tough questions in the Arizona debate about why he favored open trade with China, he responded forcefully and well.

And it is not because he seems stupid, as so much of the commentary now implies. Bush is not stupid. Rather, what is unnerving about the Texas governor’s performance is he hasn’t shown that he has spent his life trying to acquire the deep pools of experience and wisdom he will need to draw upon if he becomes president.

David Brooks is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. His book, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” will be published next year.

In these debates Bush seems like a student who has skipped class for much of the semester and then crammed for the final. He sticks close to his script. He recites passages from his stump speech. He talks constantly about his past five years as governor, but very little about the decades before. He doesn’t seem to be drawing on a full range of life experiences. Five years as a successful governor of a large state is impressive. But what was he doing, for example, during the first four decades of his life to develop good judgment?

Judgment is an elusive quality. The ancient Greeks had a term, “metis,” to describe a person with good judgment. They were getting at something different than book learning or the sort of epiphany that comes all at once. Metis is more like practical knowledge, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Odysseus was the model of a person with metis because he could improvise his way through unexpected situations. A person with metis has a feel for the landscape of reality. He or she knows which things can fit together and which never will. He or she has an instinct for where solutions lie. An apprentice can learn the rules of carpentry, but only a metis-rich master will know when the rules should be followed and when they should be broken. A student may get a degree in education, but only a wise teacher will know how to control a chaotic class, and afterward the teacher may not be even able to fully explain how she did it.

The English writer Isaiah Berlin was describing this quality when he wrote, “It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be altered, or even fully described or calculated.”

The crucial thing about metis is you can’t sit down and study it. You can study grammar, but the ability to speak is acquired slowly and through experience. Good judgment is accumulated through a series of random acquisitions over time. Only after many years do these random acquisitions cohere into a full picture, and even then the wisdom acquired may not be fully articulable.

There’s a reason many cultures revere the elderly. The old may not be sharp as the young, but over decades they have acquired metis. There is substance to their judgment that is superior to mere cleverness. And we want to feel that our national leaders posses this time-ripened substance.

There are no Odysseuses in either the Republican or Democratic presidential fields. But most of the candidates have at least spent their lives building toward this opportunity. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), as he never stops reminding us, has served in the U.S. Senate for more than two decades. Bauer has never held elective office, but he has worked in national politics for decades. Whether you agree with him or not, his years of cultivation are obvious; he has thought things through. Because he has spent his life reading and talking about government and values, he has skills with language. He has developed the analytic abilities that allow him to form opinions on his own. He knows what he thinks.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona was inculcated from childhood by his father and grandfather--both admirals--in the ethos of public service. His war experiences forced him to make profound judgments about how to behave in terrible circumstances. More than that, he has spent the years since hungry for knowledge and active in government. When you ask him what he reads, he will mention some short story by Somerset Maugham or William Trevor. These are not the authors phony politicians use when they want to impress reporters. Instead, they are a sign that even when he’s stuck on a plane somewhere, McCain’s natural pleasure is to read intelligent fiction. That’s the sort of random acquisition of knowledge that fills out a person ‘s understanding of human nature.

Bush, by contrast, seems younger than his years. At least in these debates, he doesn’t come across as a person who has undergone the slow, strenuous process by which people acquire metis. Like McCain, he, too, was born into a family dedicated to public service. Yet, for large chunks of his life, he seems to have ignored the call. Earlier in this campaign, Bush’s alleged drug use caused him to shut down talk of his early adulthood. Those years remain a blank in the public mind. And many of us are forced to ask, “Can he really have acquired in the past five or nine years the sort of judgment that for most people is the work of a lifetime?” Now his candidacy is threatened by a more profound threat. Sooner or later, he will have to address these doubts about his depth by describing what he learned and how he grew from the experiences of his entire life.

It doesn’t mean he has to pretend that he comes to this race with a vast store of knowledge about foreign affairs and the inner workings of the federal government. It doesn’t mean he has to pretend he is some sort of intellectual who spent his early adulthood buried in the works of John Locke and Aristotle. Bush is never going to persuade the public he is a great philosopher. That’s fine. America is rightly suspicious of intellectuals in the White House. The semi-intellectual Adlai E. Stevenson was beaten twice by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who read pulp fiction by Zane Gray.

Nor does Bush have to persuade us that he faced the sort of ordeals that Eisenhower or McCain faced. They were thrust into extraordinary circumstances while Bush, more normal, was flying jets in the National Guard during the Vietnam War, protecting Texas from Oklahoma, as his critics say.

But he does have to go into greater detail about how those first 40 years deepened his soul and built up his store of wisdom. He has to show that, all along, he has worked and thought hard to learn the most he could from the circumstances he did face.

Bush has some amazing qualities. He is a moral, decent person. As governor of Texas and managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, he developed a successful management style. His social skills are awesome. I’ve spent the past few weeks talking to people Bush worked with as managing partner of the Rangers. They glow. They don’t just like him, they love him. Even the people he fired, such as former Rangers manager Bobby Valentine, love him.

But Bush is running for president of the United States, not ambassador or baseball commissioner. Before we vote, he has to explain the mystery of his first four decades. He has to do a better job describing what he learned during his life. He must show that he acquired the wisdom he will need when there is a crisis and the world turns to him, waiting for his judgment. *