'The limits of Bush's mind'

President Bush persists in his defense of the policies that have resulted in the decline of his fortunes.

In his recent rehearsed television conversation with 11 soldiers in Iraq, he said, "So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going ... to accept anything less than total victory." Twice he told them that the American people were behind them: "You've got tremendous support here at home." In an Associated Press poll taken in September, over half the public now says the Iraq war was a mistake.

What's happening? Is the man so insulated from the reality of events that he has come to believe his administration's propaganda? Or is there a more ominous and pervasive problem that calls into question something other than political ideology, that is influenced by a world view marked by an inability to reason logically and learn from experience?

The ability to reason accurately is not randomly distributed; some people are better at it than others. Though this is only one form of intelligence, it is an important one, and the lack of it tends to have adverse consequences on one's chances for success at tasks that require good decision-making.

Which brings us back to our president: incurious, inarticulate and insulated from people and information that might contradict his "gut feelings" or religious beliefs. To fulfill the duties of our national chief executive, intelligence is not enough - Woodrow Wilson taught us that - but a conspicuous lack of it is fatal.