THAT’S BIG NEWS

For if he means it, Bush is proposing a new model for the presidency, the commander-in-chief as CEO, with the veep as COO. It would be a tag team: the charming Mr. Outside and the substantive Mr. Inside. Cheney is the heaviest of heavyweights: White House chief of staff, rising Republican star in the House, true architect of Desert Storm and head of Halliburton, a global company with 65,000 employees.

You don’t hire Dick Cheney to attend funerals. You hire him to run your government for you, while you go out and sell your policies to the stockholders (voters). Will voters accept the management chart Bush implicitly is drawing on the white board? The election in November may well hinge on how voters answer that question.

BUSH’S FLOW CHART

Bush’s flow chart is standard enough in business, but a startling idea in the West Wing. Bush, in effect, is proposing to abandon what I’d call the Promethean view of the presidency, the image of the burdened Leader of the Free World as a larger-than-life demigod, grappling alone with the fate of the planet at midnight in the Oval Office. It’s a made-for-TV model that began with John F. Kennedy–and may or may not be ending with Bill Clinton. W’ve all seen the pictures, a staple of White House reporting and photojournalism for a generation. JFK was the quintessential hero, surrounded by family, loyalists and aides, and yet somehow alone as he dealt with Khrushchev or the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy’s death heightened the mystique.

So did LBJ, a genuinely larger-than-life man whose toweringly persuasive body language–or slumping despair over Vietnam–were captured forever on 35-millimeter.

Clinton is the sad, inevitable conclusion of the trend: a brilliant man who lives for the limelight, who is capable of great individual acts–and embarrassingly egregious ones. Clinton can’t help but talk about how hard he’s working, how much midnight oil he’s burning for the sake of America. And he HAS worked hard, and achieved much.

But it always, annoyingly, seems to be about HIM. And it can be a dicey way of doing business. Take a look at the Camp David talks. Clinton spent two weeks on a career-capping one-man crusade. Diplomacy literally ground to a halt when he was away in Japan. It was heroic, in terms of sincerity and hours logged. But he put the prestige of the presidency on the line–and it didn’t work.

I may be wrong, but I can’t imagine George W. Bush–if he’s lucky enough to get elected–spending two weeks up late, locked down in a room with Arafat and Barak.

Or Al Gore, for that matter. He’s not a man of raging ego. He doesn’t feel he has to dominate a room–and doesn’t try. But he’s a solo operator in his own way, which is to say intellectually. He has circle upon circle of advisers, but almost all of them seem to orbit around him at a considerable distance. Gore likes to master all the details himself, and be his own best counsel, and then issue a statement ex cathedra.

And generally that’s worked. People make fun of him for his stiffness, but the guy has been ahead of the curve on a host of issues: global warming, welfare reform, the bombing of Bosnia, the vote (rare for a Democrat) in favor of the Gulf War. He figures things out, alone in his cork-lined room. It’s the starving artist as political savant.

A BUSINESS TEAM

Bush’s model for how to operate comes from three places: the Harvard business school, his experiences in the corporate world and from watching his dad. At the B-school they taught the virtues of delegation and keeping your desktop clean. Dubyah does both with a vengeance. He learned about assembling tight-knit, fast-moving corporate structures in the Texas oil fields and in his baseball years. He learned about discretion (aka: secrecy), top-down bureaucratic management and the uses of loyalty from watching his father and his aides run and win the Gulf War in 1991.

Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf got all the ink for Desert Storm, but it was Cheney who put the thing together. Soft-spoken, discreet, tough, Cheney was President Bush’s alter ego–his COO. And it worked.

It was a quick and brutal war. Americans never saw the horrible loss of life on the other side. The press was collared and spoon-fed. But the war was wildly popular and deemed just–and it restored the country’s confidence in its military prowess.

Cheney’s range of knowledge and experience is astonishing, especially when compared with Bush the Younger’s lack of either.

But Bush’s answer is that leadership is about knowing how to hire the best people. It’s about making sure DKE has the best pledge class. That’s what his dad did, he thinks, and now he wants to do that, too. Who better to help him than a man deemed by many to be the most competent and thoughtful of all his own father’s aides?

COMPENSATING FOR LIMITATIONS

Bush has his limitations: a lack of curiosity, for one; a range of experience that is more limited than he realizes; a love of tribal secrecy and ritual that would be quaint were it not so deeply disdainful of anyone who isn’t a made man in the family.

But he does have a secure, profoundly normal ego. He’s not the least bit uptight about admitting to the world at large that he doesn’t know everything about everything, and that he needs as many Dick Cheneys around him as he can possibly find.

Either his admission is very foolish, or he knows something that his critics don’t. Either he is advertising his own lack of preparation–which could kill his chances of victory–or he is a man of refreshing honesty, placing the focus where it belongs, on assembling a solid team, ready to govern, if and when he wins the White House.

Which is it? We’ll know soon enough, once the voters decide what he means by “valuable partner.”