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PresidencyA Galaxy of Goals
Timeline: Picking His Targets

Report Cards on Bush's Goals:
• Space
• Energy
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"Please stow your expectations securely in the overhead bin, as they may shift during the trip and could fall and hurt someone--especially me."

That was Texas Gov. George W. Bush, joking with reporters who had joined him on his chartered plane at the airport in Austin. He still hadn't told them where they were going, but soon enough they were on their way to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was June 12, 1999, and, as he was about to make clear to 200 supporters in a hangar at the Cedar Rapids airport, Bush was running for president. He would take part in the August straw poll, he said, and planned to compete in the caucuses the following winter. It's telling that Bush talked about expectations on the way to Iowa, because, as it turned out, his presidency, perhaps more than any other, has been driven by expectations--his own.

At a barbecue that day in Amana, Iowa (a fundraiser for Rep. Jim Nussle, now the White House budget chief), Bush said, "I will be an activist president who sets goals worthy of a great nation." He offered three that day, and he hasn't stopped setting goals, worthy or not, in the seven-plus years since he came to Washington. On everything from increasing minority homeownership to reducing deaths from malaria, from cutting mercury emissions to putting an astronaut on Mars, he has chosen to declare an expectation, and a deadline, and then let government policy flow from there.

The results? Mixed--or still pending. Some of Bush's deadlines are 10, 15, even 20 years out. A few of his goals have shifted government policy in major and perhaps irrevocable ways. Some won't amount to much unless his successor (or successors) signs on to the vision. Others have already drifted out of sight.

Setting a goal is one way of enunciating the presidential agenda, which, nine times out of 10, is the agenda that engages Washington. Presidents have been proposing programs since the earliest days of the Republic, but Bush has made leadership by goal-setting the signature of his administration. "It is an ethic, actually," says Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary. It puts the focus on results rather than resources. Bush's response to any proposal, he says, is this: "How will you know you're being successful?"

It is not hard to see that where this approach has worked, it has combined realistic expectations, clear delegation of responsibility, and concerted follow-up. Where the thinking was muddled, or the attention span lacking, the president's track record has not been as enviable.

On the pages that follow, National Journal examines a selection of the nuts-and-bolts goals that Bush has proposed over the years--in other words, those with deadlines and measurable outcomes--and weighs the progress that his admi nistration has made in fulfilling them. There's a goal for seemingly any topic. Broadband access? Water consumption by federal agencies? A free-trade agreement with Peru? They're all there. (And he got that free-trade agreement, by the way, with time to spare.)

Left out of this consideration are what might be called Bush's rhetorical goals, the ones that are more about aspiration than expectation. To be sure, there have been plenty of those, too. At his second inaugural, Bush said, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Stirring, perhaps, but to see what's lacking in this sort of a goal, go back to that day in Iowa, when candidate Bush said this:

"My first goal will be to usher in the responsibility era, an era that stands as stark contrast to the last few decades, when our culture has clearly said, 'If it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else.' "

Note: There's no deadline, and era-ushering is pretty hard to measure.

"My second goal, and one of the biggest goals for the next president, is to rally the armies of compassion that exist in every community, in every town, in every state in this great land, to nurture, to mentor, to comfort so that they can perform their commonplace miracles of renewal."

Still not exactly quantifiable.

"And my third goal," he said, "and we should make this solemn commitment in this country, is that every child must be educated. And no child shall be left behind."

Here's a theme that Bush would elaborate on--and add specifics to--over the next two years. (More about No Child Left Behind further down.) But in the early going, he wasn't laying out a blueprint for management so much as he was trying to set a tone. More than five years later, when he was sworn in for a second term, Bush set as his goals not only the rollback of world tyranny but the global spread of democracy, and these, too, were tone-setting and rhetorical--more so, in fact, than some of his critics feared at the time.

If there has been one area where Bush has resolutely not wanted to set goals, it's Iraq, the defining event of his presidency. Deadlines smack of timelines, and the president has tried to avoid any expectations for Iraq that would tie his hands down the road. Under pressure from Congress, he finally agreed in early 2007 to establish 18 "benchmarks" by which to measure the Iraqi government's progress, but he has never taken action on account of their being met--or not met. (For the record, the administration says that 15 have now been fulfilled. Critics scoff.) The one serious goal that Bush has for Iraq, although he has never cast it quite this way, is to get a status-of-forces agreement signed in 2008--ideally before the November election--that would allow U.S. troops to remain there legally. That now appears unlikely; a short-term fix would push work on a formal agreement into the next administration.

On just about everything else, though, Bush has shown a confidence in his ability to manage the future by looking forward with some specificity to getting things done. The "how" he leaves up to Congress and the bureaucrats.

Shoot the Moon

Any president coming into office with goals has to think about John F. Kennedy, who rolled out probably the most famous action goal in presidential history. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and vowed to land an American on the moon before the decade was over. What became so memorable about this promise is that it panned out. Every presidential goal since then lives in the shadow of the moon shot.

But for all its celebrity, it wasn't the most audacious presidential promise. That would be the one delivered by Franklin Roosevelt in his January 1942 State of the Union address, in which he laid out astonishingly ambitious goals for war production. He promised to double the production of planes and tanks in 1942, for instance, and to double it again in 1943. "There was no rational basis" for this, says Matthew Dickinson, a historian at Middlebury College. He believes that Roosevelt picked extreme goals to make a point, and to spur production. Americans, in any case, mobilized behind the war effort, and FDR's goals, with some tweaking, were often surpassed.

It's worth noting that as the nation went to war, Roosevelt was looking ahead on production no more than two years; he was pushing for an all-out effort, a sprint. So far, only two of Bush's goals had deadlines that have already passed. One was a promise to attain universal broadband access by 2007. This has more or less happened, at least by the White House definition that anyone who wants broadband can find it; critics point out that it's often unaffordable. The other was a pledge to build or renovate 1,200 community health centers by 2006. This goal also was fulfilled, albeit a year late.

Two of Bush's goals--the development of a new space exploration vehicle and the reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions--have 2008 deadlines; both are likely to fall short, although not by much. Deadlines for more of his goals coincide with the end of his term in office, but many others fall in subsequent presidents' administrations.

In Japan this month, Bush agreed to a climate-change goal with a deadline of 2050, more than 11 presidential terms from now.

"Leadership means pointing the way," Dickinson says. "But there's less at stake when the payoff is down the road."

Bush's fondness for goals would not appear to be a matter of simply trying to emulate JFK, or even FDR. Much was made back in 2000 of the notion that his was going to be a CEO's administration. Bush is the first president to have an M.B.A., one he earned at Harvard University in 1975. That was a time when "management by objective" had come into vogue in business schools, after the publication of Peter Drucker's book The Practice of Management in 1954 and its updated edition, called simply Management, in 1970. "Set objectives," Drucker counseled. Set different ones for each crucial area of the organization.

A recent publication by the Harvard Business School Press, Setting Goals That Others Will Pursue: Committing to an Outcome, stresses that goal-setting and -monitoring allow organizations to focus on what is most important, and to waste less energy on distractions. This principle may seem like common sense to many, but it has been much more a hallmark of the business world that Bush emerged from than of the political sphere where most presidents and would-be presidents cut their teeth.

One of the leading theoreticians of goal-setting is Edwin A. Locke, professor emeritus at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Locke has rather strong feelings about the desirability of a tightly limited government, so he's not fond of many of the government programs for which Bush has set goals. But he agreed to lay out the sorts of things that make for a good goal.

First of all, a goal must have an implementation plan, and also a budget. "If the CEO actually wants to accomplish the goal," people have to be assigned to the project.

Second, a deadline of, say, 2030 is meaningless in almost every case. Too many unknowns could crop up between now and then.

Third, goals that can be overtaken by unforeseen technological innovations don't make much sense.

Fourth, with complex tasks it is better to challenge the staff to come up with strategies, rather than set targets. In 2002, Bush set a goal of reducing mercury emissions by 46 percent by 2010; so far, no progress has been made on that. It might be more sensible to challenge government and industry to find practical and affordable ways to cut mercury pollution, rather than set what seems to be an arbitrary target.

Fifth, people need to know how they're doing.

Sixth--well, this isn't really part of the list, but Locke has to get a dig in somewhere--"the government sets the wrong goals in most of the things it does, so ineptness [on achieving these goals] can be a good thing."

Dickinson, the historian, adds another thought: Some goals are doable, and some goals are a shot in the dark. Bush, for instance, wants to have an astronaut on the moon by 2020. We know that's possible, because it has been done before. Bush also wants to cut Mideast oil imports by 75 percent by 2025, but it's not at all clear how to go about doing that.

Goals can be contradictory: Bush wants to cut the budget deficit, but he also wants to send a team of astronauts to Mars. Doing both at the same time may not be possible.

Goals also carry with them an aura of simplicity, or at least clarity. Such an aura can be deceiving.

"Proficiency by 2014"

Consider, for instance, No Child Left Behind. It may be closer to a model goal than some of Bush's others, for a number of reasons. It has garnered so much study and controversy over the past five years that it resists the sort of snapshot treatment afforded by the graphics that accompany this article.

The conservative education reform movement that gathered steam in the Reagan years put a great deal of emphasis on "outputs," rather than "inputs," and a generation later that ethos may explain some of Bush's preference for goal-setting. It surely informed No Child Left Behind. When it comes to schools, the president likes to talk about "the soft bigotry of low expectations," and he argues instead for high and well-defined expectations. Proposed in 2001, and enacted into law in 2002, No Child Left Behind requires that every American student be proficient by 2014.

It accords fairly well, at least on first glance, with Locke's rules for the proper use of goals. The deadline is not so far off as to be somebody else's problem. The law leaves it to the states to come up with the tests that define proficiency and to design the programs that should achieve the goal--appropriate for a complex task. Students, teachers, and principals clearly know how they're doing, thanks to annual tests. Margaret Spellings, the Education secretary, has been a tireless promoter of the law. Locke thinks that the government has no business running education, but he should at least appreciate the refusal of the Bush administration to throw much money at the efforts to reach the goal.

Critics, of course, say that the lack of federal financial support is a big problem. Conservatives argue that the single-minded nature of the goal ends up lowering the bar for talented students. Others ask whether "proficiency" is the right target for all. The emphasis on testing draws flak from many directions. If the country fails to meet the goal by 2014, will it be Bush's fault? The next president's? Or will 50 state superintendents, or 14,000 local school districts, be to blame?

A recent assessment by the Education Department found that the Reading First program, a phonics-based instructional package that was touted by conservatives and came into prominence with No Child Left Behind, had not improved the reading scores of poorly performing students. (The way Reading First was pushed on schools has attracted a lot of criticism, but that is a separate issue.) The assessment, however, measured comprehension--without addressing the question of whether students who do poorly at school may come from homes with little intellectual stimulation. They may have been dealing with words and situations on a test that they were totally unfamiliar with. Is there a limit to what a reading program can accomplish?

Chronologically, the country is halfway to the deadline by now. Because states measure their own progress, it's difficult to offer a single, national assessment. In general, levels of "proficiency" are rising, although at present the trends aren't pointing to 100 percent by 2014. The states are counting on a steeper curve over the next five years. Researchers, though, also note that they aren't sure the gains result from the NCLB. But at least scores aren't going down.

Disaster Upon Disaster

It rained the night before Bush landed in Cedar Rapids on that 1999 trip, and it rained again the night he left. Jittery Iowans took note of the weather; the previous month had brought record-breaking floods. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was still busily at work in the state. The next month, July, would bring more floods, and again President Clinton would declare several counties disaster areas. That record stood until this spring.

Did the weather cast some sort of shadow on the administration that began forming on the day of Bush's visit?

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the formation of the Homeland Security Department, Bush directed FEMA to draw up a National Preparedness Goal for use in any sort of disaster. The effort became a sprawling, bureaucratic, infinitely expanding enterprise. Finally, three years later, in spring 2005, FEMA was ready--with an interim National Preparedness Goal. Five months after that came Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA went back to the drawing board, and last year it quietly changed the title of the project to the National Preparedness Guidelines. FEMA has earned plaudits because it performed so capably in Iowa and other flooded states this year. It did so without a goal.