Our first M.B.A. president has not been a good advertisement for business school. On the surface, George W. Bush has C.E.O. style down cold. He lays out a "vision," delegates without hesitation, and runs as crisp a meeting as one could hope to attend. The Decider has no trouble making up his mind.

Yet as we begin to close the book on Bush's presidency, his economic decisionmaking looks like a parody of executive method: Wear a pressed suit, be on time for meetings, and radiate confidence at all times. Bush's choices haven't just tended toward poor outcomes; those outcomes have been the inevitable result of bad decisionmaking. Not understanding economic policy might be forgiven. Not listening to people who do cannot be. (See which chief executives most resemble our commander in chief.)

Bush ignored the first rule of executive success when he followed a too-capable predecessor. Bill Clinton did not look the C.E.O. part. Faced with a decision, he would agonize, ponder, and make midnight calls. Meetings in his White House started late and ran forever. But such stylistic messiness belied an orderly mind. At the outset of his administration, Clinton faced a choice between addressing the spending priorities fundamental to his candidacy and an exploding budget deficit. He listened to all sides, mastered the arcana, and made the economically prudent, if politically damaging, choice. Alan Greenspan, a crucial eyewitness, was impressed. In his memoir, Greenspan says Clinton was "a sponge for economic data who maintained a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth."

Clinton's three Treasury secretaries—Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin (with whom I wrote a book), and Lawrence Summers—were economic policy's A team: shrewd, analytical, and widely respected on Wall Street. The president took their advice. He used honest budget numbers, didn't try to jawbone the Fed, and didn't play market pundit.

Bush's Treasury Department is the inverse of Clinton's. This administration's first two Treasury secretaries, Paul O'Neill and John Snow, were figureheads who lacked the Clinton team's political clout and market credibility. As O'Neill complained after he was shoved aside, Bush didn't engage in or even entertain any real debate about economic questions. He simply applied his universal solution of tax cuts, even in the face of renewed deficits and a costly war. Greenspan's memoir describes Bush as driven "by ideology and the desire to fulfill campaign promises made in 2000" and "incurious about the effects of his economic policy."

Of course, presidents seldom face a blunt choice between wise policy and political advantage. Almost every move involves balancing those considerations against many others. But with Bush, the balance went wildly out of whack. His 2002 decision to protect the steel industry with tariffs, later ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization, was the least principled economic act by a Republican president since Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls. When Bush could no longer use the Clinton surplus as a justification for reducing taxes, he simply rebranded his long-term tax cuts, nonsensically, as a form of short-term fiscal stimulus and an answer to terrorism. Cutting taxes was a matter of true conviction for Bush. Unfortunately, his convictions remained impervious to logic or evidence.

A shrewd C.E.O. knows that you have to reward subordinates for bringing you the bad news. Bush consistently shot the messengers, pushing out his top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, after Lindsey acknowledged that the Iraq war could cost $200 billion. (The most accurate current estimate is $1 trillion to $2 trillion.) A wise C.E.O. understands that the future extends beyond the next quarter. But Bush became fixated on a pet solution to one long-term problem—privatization as an answer to Social Security's coming insolvency—to the exclusion of all others, including a consumer-borrowing binge, exploding health-care costs, and climate change.

In Bush's final phase, the B team has finally been benched. After the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, the president got desperate enough to empower two capable and respected former Goldman Sachs executives: Josh Bolten as chief of staff and Hank Paulson as Treasury secretary. Bush's move parallels his management of the war, where after years of failure, he eventually revised his strategy. The Goldman boys have the authority that their predecessors lacked. Today, Treasury seems to play an actual role in the formation of economic policy.

It’s too late to do more than mitigate the damage. As the economy contracts, Bush's deficits deprive him of the ammunition he may need to fight a recession. He will leave miserable quandaries for his successor, who will have to figure out how to withdraw from a ruinous war and, once again, decide whether or not to deal with the deficit at the expense of ­everything else. Let us hope the next president understands what decisionmaking is, not just what it looks like.