He was running for president. The same media regard George W. Bush with what could politely be termed condescension. Descriptions of Bush dwell on his days as an Andover cheerleader and as a Yale frat boy. But ask a manager who has succeeded at winning an organization's top job, and you will find that reaching out to the defeated faction is a basic, very unsurprising step for a CEO who wants to accomplish his goals. Harvard Business School tries to train future executives for American industry, not numbers crunchers or policy analysts.
Students do spend time learning to tell debits from credits and stocks from bonds.
But they spend far more time on learning how actually to get an organization to accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish. That approach encourages the manager to put enormous emphasis on human resource management, starting with finding the right people and placing them in the right jobs. And that is just what Bush has gotten his highest marks to date for, even if a grudging press corps can't quite understand how he earned them. Showing off one's intellect, either in the pedantic manner of Al Gore or the charming manner of Bill Clinton, is in the worldview of the Harvard MBA not considered very smart. In fact, it's considered pretty dumb because it is so likely to grate on subordinates who were never at the top of their classes but whose cooperation is essential to getting the organization to run well.