Regime change doesn't solve the problem. The Bush presidency has been damaging to the country not because Bush is incompetent (we've had incompetent presidents before), nor because he's evil or malicious (which I don't believe he is), nor even because he has political goals that you or I disagree with (we've had plenty of that before, too).

We've survived plenty of bad presidencies before. The reason this one threatens to do lasting damage is because of structural damage to our political system. The United States has a long record of social, economic, and military success in large part due to our excellent form of government. Crucial to that success is the various correcting mechanisms built into the system. In addition to the celebrated checks and balances between our three branches of government, there is the balance that comes from reconciling the two sides in our two-party system. Most important of all there is the matter of accountability, ultimately to the electorate.

All of these are now severely damaged, in many cases deliberately damaged by the Bush regime. Power is dangerously concentrated in the executive branch now. Current lack of congressional oversight is unprecedented in our history. Even when Congress is inclined to participate in government it is crippled by lack of good information. The executive branch controls information, and it manipulates policymaking by selectively withholding it, distorting it, or in some cases even fabricating it. The judicial branch is similarly shut out, with any court that disagrees with executive power branded as "activist". Legislation is increasingly ineffective, as the executive department declines to enforce laws it doesn't like and fails to implement congressionally mandated government initiatives. Recently, the executive repertoire has expanded to redefining Congress's laws to mean something other than what Congress explicitly intended.

Partisan power has become dangerously unbalanced as well. Traditions and procedures in American government had evolved so that a certain amount of bipartisan support was necessary for major decisions. The corrosion of rules in Congress began before 2000, but it has grown considerably worse during the Bush presidency. Everything we learned in high school civics class about how laws are made is obsolete now. Sometimes members of Congress aren't even given an opportunity to read the laws they vote on, much less participate in writing them.

Worst of all is the loss of accountability. The greatest strength of our political system was the way in which successful policy would drive out unsuccessful policy. With the political equivalent of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", those policies and their implementors who succeeded in providing the electorate what it wanted would be rewarded while those that failed would not. In a healthy administration, the same dynamic occurs within the government as well. When a department's program is successful, it is emulated. When a department fails, the person responsible is sacked and someone else is given a chance. Even if it isn't that person's "fault" per se, it's still part of the process that assures that good ideas rise to the top.

What worries me about Bush's detractors is the naive belief that simply removing Bush will solve these problems — that Bush fails simply because he's a bad president and if we replace him with a good president, all will be well. It won't. Without repair of our political system, the next president — whether Democrat or Republican — will be just as ineffective.

For all our squabbling about hot-button ideological issues, there really isn't that much distance between what Democrats and Republicans want. We all want economic prosperity, protection from terrorism, disengagement from Iraq without the Middle East exploding into a messy war, etc. The disagreement is about the best strategy for achieving these goals. Of course these are all difficult questions. If they weren't, there wouldn't be the heated debates. We're all just taking our best guesses, and no one really knows the answers. If someone did know — and again, this is the genius of our (now damaged) political system — that answer would be embraced. If someone stumbled on a plan that really did, say, bring peace to the Middle East, we wouldn't continue to bicker about it. We would say, "Hey, that really works; by all means let's do it." At worst, each party would grab the idea and claim it as its own, but either way it would get done.

Bush's detractors seem to think that he fails simply because he's dumb and has the wrong ideas and we just need to put in someone else who's smart and has the right ideas. Of course, Bush doesn't know all the answers. No one does. Our system of government does not require the president to have all the answers, and that's exactly why America has proved more successful in almost every way than totalitarian states like the Soviet Union.

The reason Bush has failed so spectactularly is that he has destroyed the mechanisms whereby good ideas rise to the top. There is no accountability anywhere in the administration, all dissenting views are vigorously squelched, and all information is kept as confidential as possible. The result is that when someone is about to do something stupid — as will inevitably happen — there is nothing there to correct the error, either before or after the fact. If some piece of our government policy is terribly misguided, there might well be a whole lot of people out there who would recognize the problem, but they probably don't get a chance to see what's going on, or if they do see it they aren't listened to. Once the bad policy is in place, it stays in place — possibly because the ill effects are kept hidden, but even after a department head accumulates a six-year record of bad results, he's still allowed to continue, because this administration values loyalty over competence.

When thinking about who to elect as president in 2008, voters — both Democrat and Republican — who are appalled by the breathtaking failure of the Bush presidency should not be thinking about which candidate, or which party, has the right policies and the right ideas. What we need to be considering is which candidate (or party) is committed to repairing a political system which brings good policies to the top regardless of who suggested them. Given that the damage to the system was done primarily as a means of pursuing power, both to the party and to the executive, undoing the damage is going to require a president willing to let go of a lot of power. What we emphatically do not need is an anti-Bush whose attitude is, "The other guys had their chance to do whatever they want without restraint; now it's our turn."

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