Ron Suskind delivers a devastating portrait of the President in this morning’s Times Magazine.

Nadezhda and I exchanged views earlier on Jonathan Raban’s recent silliness in the Guardian. In his piece, Raban purported to explain away Americans’ support for Bush by ascribing it to a “Puritan”-style reliance upon pure faith at the expense of reason – as if that great mass of Americans that does not share Raban’s contempt for Bush necessarily operates under the influence of some form of culturally-rooted religious mania. I found Raban’s piece to be a gumbo of pretend-expert condescension.

Suskind’s, though, is of a different order. Though at different points it sounds vaguely Rabanesque notes – for instance, Suskind suggests that there are a great many Americans for whom “faith” in the person of George Bush is more important than factual evidence of his policies’ worth or lack thereof – the bulk of his piece focuses upon the man rather than those who would vote for him.

And the picture it paints is not pretty. It depicts a man who has spent the bulk of his life as a bit of a bumbler, operating out of his intellectual depth and rarely adding value to any setting in which he found himself – but who, thanks to a perfect storm of luck, family influence and political timing, managed to end up as the President of the United States. Unfortunately, the Lincoln Bedroom seems to lack the qualities of a Holiday Inn Express – sleeping there added nothing to Bush’s working knowledge of the world, or to his critical or analytical faculties. Suskind argues persuasively something of which I suspect few Americans require much persuasion – that Bush is not a particularly smart chap.

The crux of the piece, though, is Suskind’s explanation of how Bush, once in office, and once required actually to think, confronted the problem of his inability to do so. According to Suskind (and Joe Biden, who is cited liberally throughout), rather than seeking to develop those analytical muscles that previously had lain dormant, he turned inward. He chose to deify those internal capabilities that he does have, like the ability to identify a broad goal and to move toward it – and, most importantly to Suskind, to have “faith,” come what may, that the goal he has chosen is the right one. For these purposes, I do not read Bush’s “faith” as having so much a divine element (though Suskind alludes to this as well), as I see it as a dogged refusal to let the pointyheads and brainiacs – those to whom he had always felt so inferior in so many prior settings – shake him from his path now that he was really in charge. Suskind says that the operational effect of this in the White House has been to create disdain for analysis, a contempt for rigorous, fact-based thought and for inconvenient conclusions. Those who engage in that sort of thing are condemned to the purgatory of the disloyal. They lack faith.

Suskind clearly has an axe to grind – he ghost wrote Paul O’Neill’s book, and felt the backblast as strongly as O’Neill did. Even taking his desire for revenge into account, though, no thoughtful supporter of the President (or, more accurately, no supporter of the President who is willing to be thoughtful) can dismiss Suskind’s depiction. If anything, the external evidence of the man available to those of us not on the inside (and that means everyone) is entirely consistent with Suskind’s indictment. Suskind could well be wrong about George Bush and the way he thinks and leads, but there is no evidence available in the market to suggest that he is. Suskind’s piece has the ring of truth about it. It is in keeping with the evidence of our own eyes.

And if he’s right, I – one who six months ago was absolutely inclined to support the President – am afraid. It is, frankly, terrifying to think that the man in the Oval Office both shuns rigorous thought himself and suppresses it among those who report to him. It is one thing for our President to not be capable of serious intellectual activity himself. It is quite another for him to be overtly anti-intellectual, and for him to promote that ethos in the White House. Right or Left, conservative or liberal, this is nothing more than being gladly and willfully dumb. And we are at a juncture in time when we certainly cannot afford to be dumb.

Those who would dismiss Suskind’s piece as partisan hackery must do more than discredit the author. They must explain why Suskind is wrong. To my mind, to fail to do so, but to continue nevertheless to support the person of George Bush in his current position, is to commit an act of reasonless faith that, it seems, would be quite familiar to George Bush himself.