The Legacy of President George W. Bush

Apropos of this discussion between a Reaganite and political liberal, we should ask how history will remember our current president as the final year of his second term, much as his predecessors, slows to a crawl as we await the election of our new leader. Mr. Bush, depending on the poll, regularly checks in with a low-30s approval rating, some thirty points lower than the last two-term presidents in 1988 and 2000. A recent study of presidential historians made national headlines for declaring GWB "the worst of the worst" and believing there is little chance for a post-presidential recovery.

Except that presidencies are nearly always reexamined and usually rehabilitated. Richard Nixon, twenty years removed from the national disgrace he put our nation through, received far kinder treatment in 1994 when eulogists also described his willingness to sign liberal domestic bills from a Democratic Congress. His foreign policy, in particular China and SALT with the Soviet Union, also seemed to rise above the rancid smell of Watergate and Cambodia. Personally, I do not feel he deserved such an elevation ("failure" to "average") given the patently illegal acts such as ordering the CIA to help cover-up the Watergate break-in. We also now rarely remember his "secret plan" to win the war in Vietnam only led to more American deaths as he and "K" needed four years to reach an accord with the North Vietnamese in Paris. President Nixon's disastrous early-1970s economic policies, to include wage-price fixing, are also swept under the rug.

Another recent example, ironically enough, is one George Herbert Walker Bush, who is enjoying the highest popularity of his life at the expense of his eldest son. Similar to Nixon, Bush the Elder is now lauded as some sort of strategic genius for not ordering coalition forces to Baghdad in 1991, as though his clarion calls for the Iraqi people to rise up (only to be vanquished by Saddam Hussein's black helicopters) never had occurred. People also forget only 37% of the nation sought fit to return a once-90% approval rating-president to the White House, the lowest of any incumbent since 1912. Governor Clinton's economic arguments did the most damage, even though the gasoline tax raise and other measures had lifted the US out of recession by the time of the vote. While many hail Poppy Bush as a moderate, his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, especially to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, remains an enormous blotch on his presidential resume.

So what about W? Well, in ten or twenty years (perhaps), we should have some greater clarity on the progress in Iraq, and many pundits have long regurgitated that if Iraq turns out well, history will look at him in a different light. Until then, however, we must put up with the argument that Iraq was a "stupid war." Iraq is the greatest example of the ultimate irony of the Bush administration: a man dedicated to a largely Manichean perspective led leading progressive lights to abandon their cherished sense of nuance and shades of gray. Iraq 2003, therefore, was not a stupid war. It was probably not the best decision at the time, although, of course there is no way to know what Saddam or his sons might have been planning for the inevitable time when UN sanctions would end and the "no-fly" zones would disappear.

For the umpteenth time, I did not support the war, mainly on account of my distrust of the administration, but I still harbor doubts as to whether I was wrong. Aside from the real possibility that an Arab strongman, in the mold of Saddam, eventually retakes control of the shattered nation, it is hard to see how the Bush invasion, even if carried out in a manner designed less to win the peace then the war, stands on the wrong side of history. In 1954, the now-venerated President Eisenhower stood on the wrong side of history when he agreed to a joint-MI6-CIA operation to return the Shah to Iran, ousting a democratically elected leader. That was the worst US foreign policy mistake and we continue to pay for our sins of the past today. Iraq was also assembled by a group of white men at Versailles, i.e., it is nothing but an artificial nation, exhibiting similar tensions as the Balkans. Whether the Baathist regime truly would have returned to its pre-1991 policies and actions, especially under the youthful leadership of Uday and Qusay, is also unknown, but one can make a strong circumstantial case that sooner or later, we would have to deal with them, lest we allow another Saladin-wannabe to warre on neighboring countries, namely Israel.

I simply try to look at the administration in a fair-minded way. I disagreed with the opening of Camp X-Ray and the usage of Guantanamo Bay, but I have never seriously considering trying enemy combatants in civil courts. The choice then is either to turn the captured over to international institutions and/or use our intelligence services to terminate the "worst of the worst," or perhaps the abandon the CIA altogether. The issue of torture is a very difficult one, though I maintain many of the administration's critics define the term too broadly to include discomfort during coercive questioning. There is no denying, however, that the administration did not care enough to properly safe-guard places such as Abu Ghraib and who knows how many other prisons that have yet to see the light of day, and that too many in the executive branch focused on whether we could employ certain methods not whether we should.

Most of the president's "war on terror" policies are represented by a single phrase: 9/12. I do not think we can express the differences between the two parties any clearer. Republicans, generally, believe the executive branch has an obligation to act as though the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had only transpired yesterday; Democrats, generally, believe that the USA PATRIOT Act, unlicensed domestic wiretapping, and other measures are significantly less appropriate as we move toward the seven-year anniversary of 9/11. The further from the date when 3,000+ Americans died on this president's watch, the less public support exists for his policies; the further from the date when the Continental US suffered its worst attack in 187 years, the less enthusiasm for the Cheneyist unitary theory of government.

The irony of Iraq is that had Mr. Bush solely listened to Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and installed an American puppet for at least the time being or Secretary of State Colin Powell's warning to only execute the invasion with overwhelming force and a full international mandate, his political situation would likely look better today. Instead, the president first listened to the "hawks" and then clung to the "doves" and their admonition that he respect the "pottery barn" rule (you break it, you own it) of Iraq. Mr. Bush also failed to order his "surge" until January 2007, perhaps two years (or more) after it would have done the most good. Fearing loss of political support and hewing to Mr. Rumsfeld's "lighter force" vision, the president pursued largely a failed Iraq policy from 2004-06. Whether his last-ditch effort to salvage the American invasion succeeds remains an open question.

Criticism of the president for failing to capture Osama bin Laden or "finishing the job" in Afghanistan is also largely unfounded. While it is true the US pulled troops from the Eastern theatre to fight in Mesopotamia, the price requisite to end al-Qaeda on the AFG-PAK border would have proved enormously steep, perhaps inflicting casualty rates unseen since Vietnam or even 1864. The president deserves criticism, though, for erroneously believing that NATO could shoulder the bulk of Afghanistan's security and that it would not resent the American invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeldian tone-deaf statements of arrogance ("Old Europe") have only made our present task harder.

Domestically, according to my ideology, I resent almost every action taken by this president, from his four tax cuts to his underfunded education policy to his bloated farm bill to his illegal steel tariffs to his bias against stem-cell research to his blatantly dishonest Medicare bill of 2003 to his federal court appointments to his Katrina response to his administration's views on voting rights, rights of citizens to sue businesses for wrongdoing, and a host of other matters. We should expect this, given my aforementioned disposition, but does it necessarily mean he was a failure?

The truth is more a mixed bag, with predictably some big hits and some misses. Notwithstanding the zero-net gain for the middle class, we must admit that the president's low-tax policies allowed businesses to flourish during the middle six years of his tenure, and at present, we have not seen a recession since late 2001. Exercising his prodigious power, unlike any since LBJ in '65, the president cajoled a willing Republican Congress into doing his economic bidding. Blocking tax cuts has always proved difficult, but not even Ronald Reagan enjoyed this level of success. Additionally, given a second case with the appointment of Samuel Alito, the president has steered the US Supreme Court, once a bastion of triumphant liberalism, to the brink of a true conservative majority for the first time since before the second Roosevelt administration. Democrats and liberal interest groups filibusterd Miguel Estrada and several others, but the loss of Justice O'Connor for Alito may prove huge in the years to come.

In keeping with tradition, Mr. Bush's second term has been rife with failure. The phrases privatization, Katrina, and amnesty sum up US domestic politics from 2005-08. Despite only a 51-49 majority over John Kerry, the president put much of his political capital in a risky scheme that not even a 489 electoral vote-carrying Ronald Reagan had dreamed of trying. Privatization of Social Security met the same fate as Hillarycare: each died when the president's party folded on the measure. Despite a working margin in both houses, the president could not even get a floor vote on his bill, and the events of Hurricane Katrina crushed it completely.

You know, I never did blame the president much for his response. True, things may have gone differently if he had been in the White House at the time rather than Crawford. True, the decision to merely fly over the scenes of the wreckage coupled with the tone-deaf comments about Mike Brown's organization proved a PR disaster... but, folks, this is what you get when you elect a Republican. Democratic presidents heartily embrace the challenge of rebuilding America's core, witness the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans generally do not believe in this sort of thing: their existence is to protect wealth and the assets of the wealthy. Rich, white Republicans have no interest in lower-class people, white or otherwise, because they regard the cities as failed areas, unworthy of investment. Louisiana could have voted for John Kerry (or, for that matter, Al Gore) yet they did not. The destruction caused by the Category-4 hurricane and the succeeding collapse of the levies provided a near-unprecedented opportunity to invest in American workers. Unfortunately, the wrong political party occupied both Congress and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe, from a president that had pushed through the Midnight Medicare bill and a general big-government conservative we should have expected more. Nah.

Although I disagreed with some parts of the bill and ultimately opposed it, I do afford the president some credit on the immigration issue. As a former resident and governor of Texas, he clearly possesses a different attitude than the Minutemen or Tom Tancredo or other hard-liners, well, that and he wishes to protect a cheap source of labor for American businesses. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush was willing to fracture his party on perhaps their most divisive issue and in the end all he accomplished was the permanent 10% loss of support from Americans that had stuck with him since 1999. Someday, perhaps in the next administration, Congress will pass a sensible, workable, comprehensive immigration reform bill, one that is humane if not enabling to prior law-breakers. Much of that bill will resemble the Bush-Kennedy-McCain effort, but many problems remain.

The ultimate legacy of this president is of enormous power followed by crippling impotence, in this respect he is most analogous to President Lyndon Johnson. Both presidents watched a long, uncertain war/occupation drain their resources, but each also presided over the end of a political era. For Johnson, the Roosevelt coalition that had sustained the Democratic Party for nearly forty years and allowed for only one Republican president collapsed. For this president, the Reagan era, nascent in the glory days of the Great Society, is now also at an end, the conclusion of yet another near-forty calendar cycle. Bits of this were evident in the 2000 presidential election, when both leftist candidates combined to breach 50% for the first time in twenty-four years... then came 2001. And then came the 2002-2004 Bush peak that rendered the once-proud Democratic Party thoroughly mute on a host of issues and down to a post-New Deal record-low of forty-four Senate seats in 2005.

Such power, however, plunged in 2005 and perhaps dissipated for good in the wake of the first Democratic House majority in twelve years and the loss of Senate control following the last midterm elections. Even so, Mr. Bush was merely adhering to type: no Republican president has left office with either house of Congress under his party's control since 1929. President Bush will face severe criticism for actions taken on the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, Kyoto and the unwillingness to formulate an environmental policy, and for not taking the issue of health care insurance seriously. He will deserve all of those stigmas, even though his ideology simply did not allow for actions desired by political liberals, who often double as historians. They will also likely provide short shrift to the president's aid to Africa initiatives and general good relations with the rising powers of China and India, whose turn toward industrial superproduction will tell much of the story of the 21st Century.

Liberals will also likely never fully comprehend why the president succeeded as much as he did: people liked him and Democrats never seriously contended the point, from 1999 to present. No elitist, this side of FDR, has ever successfully sold himself to the public as a regular guy like the Andover-Yale-Harvard Business School-oil executive-baseball team owner, with help from his memorable "Bushisms" of course. He also, from the time his discipline helped end the great Ann Richards' career in 1994, possessed an ability to exude comfort in his own skin, something his opponents generally struggled to match. He may well merit mention as the anomalous president: the only one to win reelection after losing the popular vote, the only Republican ever elected without capturing Illinois, the only presidential victor to fail to carry both California and New York, the only presidential victor in the modern era to win the White House with merely 246 electoral votes, the last Republican for some time(?), etc.

His administration, from nearly the moment it set foot in Washington, believed it had the right to impose their policies on the American people, even if that meant closely scrutinizing Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger or populating the Justice Department with Republican loyalists, in a fashion guaranteed to rile an opposition still murmuring, "We had 600,000 more votes." They chose to ignore leading newspapers such as the Old Cranky Lady and the Guardian, except for the former when it disclosed the extent of the FISA-free domestic wiretapping program. Its fighters (Tom DeLay, Douglas J. Feith) are gone now and only a few defenders remain, as the feckless Secretary of State continues her quest for a Nobel Peace Prize in the labyrnith that is the Middle East peace talks. Never mind that Bush administration intransigence and obtuseness had helped create the rise and ultimate triumph of Hamas in the first place.

The CIA chose to undermine its boss on Iran some months ago; time will tell if they acted rightly. Despite his assertion that acts in Darfur undertaken with at least the tacit cooperation of the Sudanese government (and bankrolled by Chinese thirst for oil) constitute genocide, the US has contributed little to resolving the effort, once more persuading the easily convinced that the US has no moral authority. With Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, it is possible that the road to Iraq may have proceeded much differently and yielded a far greater mandate than the "illegal" war charged by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I have returned to foreign policy at the end because it seems very clear that Mr. Bush's legacy will be defined on his foreign policy, no matter which way Iraq, or what is to follow after its partition, falls in the coming years.

And so while liberals may wish to place him at the very bottom of forty-two men, they must admit some admiration for the early aggression, fostered by 9/11, taken by a man known to much of the world as a minority president. He did not observe the niceties of even the Reagan era and escalated partisanship, on the uptick during the 1990s, into its most rancorous state since the 1870s, all, perhaps, under the belief similar to the Germans in 1913, that the era for his political beliefs was in eclipse and that Republicans had to grab what they could, 9/11-assisted or not, while they could. The Germans lost an empire; the Republicans have lost control of the political dialogue and most young voters who will decide the next chief executives. Iraq may rate as Mr. Bush's singular legacy, but if Senator John McCain is routed by the Democrat, presumably Barack Obama and thus overturns the "open election" theory, we may also remember him as the captain of a sinking political ship. Given Mad Mac's public position on Iraq, President Bush has nearly as much invested in the Arizona senator's victory as Mr. McCain does himself.