My Assessment of the Bush Presidency

George Bush is correct when he asserts that his presidency cannot be fairly judged until time has passed and emotion has dissipated. He leaves it to the historians to judge his performance, and I agree that it is they who will ultimately help analyze and interpret the last eight years.

That said, here in the closing days of George Bush’s Presidency it is fitting that I take a few minutes to give my impression of his impact on this nation and the world, and I will do so using the standard Good, Bad and Ugly approach that I’ve used in the past.

First of all, I will say that I have supported George Bush fairly consistently since he won the nomination in 2000. His Summer 2000 convention speech was truly stirring, and his conservative principles…while not completely aligned with mine…were appealing. I applauded his Vice Presidential pick (and still do) and generally supported his cabinet picks.

But it is with some remorse that I say his presidency has been quite average, certainly behind both Reagan and Clinton’s in my lifetime, better than Carter’s, and definitely more consequential than his father’s. George Bush’s greatest strength—his resolution in the face of doubt—is a supremely useful character trait if you are right almost all the time. But in this presidency, he was wrong several times, and he did not cast aside his unshakable sense of himself in time to salvage situations that might have been correctable. His presidency is one that was marked by unexamined (or re-examined) presumptions, and it is this lack of ability to sense when the ship was headed out of the middle of the channel that dooms this presidency to the middle of the pack.



THE GOOD

1. The Surge. He doubled down when the odds were most against him. He ignored political expediency and the nabobs of his own party. He sought out the one General who would not accept defeat and the two of them made history. This was one of the most remarkable turnarounds in American military history, and it was a profile in courage.

2. No Terror Attacks Since 9-11. If on that horrible day seven years ago, someone had said that these attacks would not be repeated within the term of this man’s presidency, would any of us have believed it? George Bush dedicated his every day to ensuring that this would not happen again. He gathered up the estimable resources of this great nation and he used the power of his office to create a latticework of measures that have made it increasingly difficult to attack us. I believe his single-mindedness on this subject hurt virtually every other part of his presidency. And I don’t think he would disagree. Nor do I think such focus was uncalled for.

3. August 2001 Stem Cell Policy. By Executive Order, in a nationally televised speech, George Bush revealed the depths to which he had analyzed this difficult matter and the difficult decision he had reached. Calling on the most famous medical ethicists in our country, he received wise counsel and a great variety of opinion. He ultimately decided that he would limit federally funded research to the stem cell lines then in existence, and that he would not permit the use of federal funds to continue to create embryos that would then be used to create stem cells. This was a courageous and moral decision, and one that I have always admired. This decision was at the heart of the renaissance of research into non-fetal stem cells, research that has shown great promise in these past few years.

4. The Supreme Court. George Bush’s selection of John Roberts as Chief Justice and Samuel Alito as Associate Justice were inspired, brilliant decisions. Both men judge from a conservative bent, both respect separation of powers, limited government and the purview of the legislative branch to make law—while the judicial branch interprets it. Conservatives cannot have hoped for two better men on the bench---well, Robert Bork might have been one.

5. His Leadership After 9/11. In the days after the attack, he was a calming presence, even as he steeled our resolve to take on a shadowy enemy.

6. His Relationship With Foreign Governments. Does this one surprise you? If you’re a student of the international scene, it won’t. Sure, we’re less popular in Europe and Russia. But how about China? India? Japan? Israel? Anti-Americanism is a disease deeply ingrained in the victim narrative of once-great Europe. The new President will have a honeymoon with them, but it is only a matter of time before they revert to form.

7. AIDS in Africa. Has any other President since the worldwide outbreak of AIDS done more? George Bush has put into place more programs designed to stem the tide of AIDS in Africa than even Saint Bill, and he did it quietly. This was something that obviously lived in the man’s heart, and he put this feeling into action.

8. Tax Cuts of 2001, 2003. Enough said, I’m a Conservative.

THE BAD

1. The War in Iraq. I do not fault President Bush for taking us to war in Iraq; I fault him for allowing Donald Rumsfeld to preside over a flawed approach to the conduct of that war. Let me say this a different way: George Bush made the right call in invading Iraq. He was woefully inadequate to the task of asking the probing questions necessary to ensure a war plan that was inclusive enough to consider what happened when we “won”

2. “Mission Accomplished”. Oh my, has this one turned out bad. Well, it was probably bad to begin with. Landing on an aircraft carrier to declare victory was dumb and showy.

3. Harriet Myers. The pulled nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court was an act of Supreme arrogance. His supporters did not elect him to stick his lawyer on the Supreme Court so that she could turn into the new David Souter. We wanted dependable, tested, conservatives, and that’s what we got.

4. Staying Loyal To Don Rumsfeld Too Long. I liked Don Rumsfeld as a Secretary of Defense; I did not like him as a Secretary of War. His desire to come in and shake up the hidebound armed services was something I applauded at the time, even when it made additional work for me (actually, it made additional opportunity, as I loved having the room to think out loud about ways to reform things, knowing that I was doing so in an atmosphere that wanted to take on traditional ways of doing business). But Rumsfeld’s conduct of the War in Iraq was a failure, and Bush should have acted upon that much earlier.

5. The Ownership Society. Home ownership is not a civil right. It is the result of a contractually binding agreement between the owner of the home (the bank) and the person who wishes to own the home (buyer). George Bush stoked the flames of a market already beginning to blow up, and his contribution to our current financial crisis should not be underestimated. He was a cheerleader for exactly the kind of irresponsible practices that led us to where we are today.

THE UGLY

1. The Economy. George Bush will go down in history as a failure as a domestic leader, and the economy will be the cause. There is plenty here to justify this appraisal. The President likes to point to the 54 months of continuous growth that existed between the bookend recessions that marked his presidency, but the plain truth is that the growth of those 54 months was in no small measure a mirage based on a looming financial bubble that his exhortation and his failure to take on Congress contributed to.

2. Abu Ghraib. The embarrassment this scandal brought to the United States cannot be underestimated, and I believe that Abu Ghraib was a foreseeable result of the enhanced interrogation techniques that the President and his Administration supported. Please understand—I am not saying that I disagree with the President’s approval of those techniques. I am saying that when the line of what was acceptable moved, it made the unacceptable truly abhorrent, and it levied an increased responsibility on those in charge to ensure that the truly abhorrent did not occur. They were not equal to this task.

3. Russia. Bush may have thought he could look into Putin’s soul, but McCain got it right when he said, “when I look in his (Putin’s) soul, I see three letters..K..G…B… We have frightfully mismanaged the Russia account, and we have significantly misjudged the thuggery of Putin. I hope we are working hard to destabilize the Putin government.

4. The Prescription Drug Benefit. Let’s face it; most Americans feel that they should get stuff from the government now, simply because they are old. This doesn’t wash with me. Economic need should be the sole determinant of government assistance in this regard, not how old someone has become.

George Bush is an honorable man who served his country with distinction under some of the most extreme circumstances of the last 100 years. I hope that history will judge him less harshly than I have, as I truly admire and like our 43rd President. But only time will tell.