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George Bush: Five Years as President


John Simkin

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The Guardian newspaper asked six Americans for their views on George Bush's five years as president.

Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate.com and the author of the "Bushisms" series

George Bush seems less likely to be remembered as a disastrous American president than as an ultimately insignificant one. Despite his ambition to reshape American politics and society in the order of a Reagan or a Thatcher, Bush has presided over a period of national and economic drift that more closely resembles the forgettable reign of his father.

The main goal of the Bush presidency was to transform the American electorate by creating a durable Republican majority. Karl Rove, the architect of Bush's political career in Texas and Washington, has drawn an implicit analogy between his own role and that of the legendary fin-de-siècle political boss Mark Hanna, who served President William McKinley in the 1890s.

Hanna was McKinley's political brain in the way Rove is Bush's. McKinley was an affable, not-too-bright former congressman when Hanna helped to elect him governor of Ohio. In 1896, Hanna raised an unprecedented amount of money, and ran a ruthless and sophisticated campaign that got McKinley to the White House. One could go on with this analogy. McKinley governed negligently in the interests of big business and went to war on flimsy evidence that Spain had blown up the USS Maine.

The key to McKinley's success was the alliance Hanna forged between wealthy industrialists like himself, who provided cash, and workers, who provided votes. In the Bush version, the rich again provide the cash and religious conservatives provide the votes. The wealthy have been rewarded with tax cuts, the evangelicals with hard-line conservative policies on abortion, gay rights and a school prayer. Bush's re-election victory last year seemed to vindicate his and Rove's strategy of attempting to turn the country to the right. Though it was hardly a landslide, Bush did, unlike in 2000, win a genuine, popular endorsement of his policies.

But a year later, that re-election victory looks like an aberration, explained more by factors such as a weak Democratic opponent rather than any sea-change in American politics. Less than a year into Bush's second term, his approval rating has fallen to less than 40%, which approaches the nadir for any modern president at any moment in his tenure. This has happened at a time when the US economy, usually a reliable predicter of presidential popularity, has continued to grow robustly, oblivious to Bush's irresponsible fiscal policies and neglect of global competitiveness issues surrounding America's education and health care systems.

Many things have gone wrong for Bush, most notably everything that has happened in Iraq since he declared "Mission Accomplished" in the spring of 2003, but the underlying problem is his relationship to the rightwing constituency that elected him. Bush's debt to his big donors and to religious conservatives has boxed him in and pitted him against the national consensus on a range of issues. It has proven impossible for Bush to satisfy both the militant conservative base and the eternally moderate US electorate.

The president has never understood the brilliance of Ronald Reagan's way of dealing with this conflict. Reagan managed to appease the religious right with rhetoric, without actually forcing retrograde changes on divisive social issues. Reagan also placated conservatives by challenging the growth of the public sector. This is a theme Bush has soft-pedalled, preferring to allow federal spending and deficits to rise.

Whether because he is less adroit or because he truly believes what he says, Bush seems able to appease his conservative evangelical base only by surrendering to its wish-list. He has caved in to conservatives on issues including stem-cell research, pension privatisation and the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools. With his most recent Supreme Court nomination, Bush has given in further, creating at least the appearance that he is trying to get enough votes to remove the constitutional protection for abortion rights.

Through such choices, Bush propels his increasingly beleaguered administration further towards the right-hand margin - a place where his party cannot win future national elections. Possessed of the notion that he had won a mandate for radical change and enshrined a new governing majority, Bush lost sight of the eternal moderation of the American electorate. Now even rock-ribbed conservatives who face re-election next year are running away from any association with Bush because of his unpopularity.

When it comes to America's relations with the rest of the world, the damage Bush caused may take longer to repair, but his historic influence is unlikely to be any more durable. He will bequeath to our next president the remnants of a negligently planned entanglement in Iraq, but not any coherent American approach to foreign policy or international economics.

Kathleen Parker is a political commentator whose weekly column in the Orlando Sentinel is syndicated to more than 300 US newspapers

The marriage between President George Bush and his base is like any other - fraught with tensions and imperfections. So much so that, to appraise his popularity with those who brung 'em to the party, one might need to think in terms of the Ford Theatre's most infamous drama: "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Other than Bush's "fiddle-de-dee" Scarlett O'Hara approach to deficit spending ("I'll think about that tomorrow"), an immigration policy that threatens to turn the US into a private piñata for Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, and a fuzzy relationship with the religious right that has even Catholics lurching for the balcony ... he's still got a full orchestra pit.

Those most willing to give him a pass on domestic issues tend to be those who think it is critical that a Republican president restore conservatives to the federal courts, or who believe that the war in Iraq is of paramount importance, or who think both. And there still are plenty who do. These are the folks who, though they may share everyone's dismay that the war has dragged on at greater cost in blood and money than many expected, tend to see the war in Iraq as part of the second world war: not just a skirmish over oil or an exercise in daddy-revenge, but as a systemic approach to an enduring problem, a theatre in a wider war against a new and virulent fascism.

But his domestic policies have been a mixed bag - so that the conservative party has become divided over the central question of what it means to be a "conservative". Is it about protecting unborn life or keeping government out of personal decisions? Is it about preserving "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance or about freedom from all belief? Is conservatism about controlling government's appetites or about feeding the beast in the name of national security, even at the expense of civil liberties?

Thus, contradiction and paradox have become bedfellows in the Republican party's sleepover for the past five years. And much of the confusion stems from Bush's seminal decision - with the approval of the Congress, we feel compelled to note - to invade Iraq. It is hard to make a case for fiscal conservatism when you are underwriting a war. It is hard to keep government small when the mandate to prevent another 9/11 results in the creation of a mammoth new bureaucracy such as the Department of Homeland Security.

Bush's spending habits cannot be blamed entirely on the war. To true conservatives who vote Republican because they prefer limited government and low taxes, the president spends like a day-wager on a three-day drunk. His is the visionary perspective of a man for whom perfectionism is neither flaw nor pathology, but an achievable goal. Combine that philosophical perspective with the money-is-no-obstacle legacy of a born-rich kid, and you see Bush in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, no longer a mere compassionate conservative but His Majesty Comus astride his Mardi Gras float, tossing gold coins to the homeless and hungry.

Bush enjoys the further distinction of increasing spending more than his Democratic predecessor via passage of the pharmaceutical drug bill in 2003 - the largest entitlement since Medicare in 1965. And then there is his "No Child Left Behind" package that enhanced the federal government's role in education more than any measure since the 1960s.

Which is to say, a large portion of Bush's Republican base feels betrayed - even if some of their pain has been eased by recent reports of a healthy economy, new jobs, and a 20-year low in unemployment (5% as of this week). The tax cuts didn't hurt, either.

Bush's greatest failing may be his continued wooing of illegal immigrants at a time when his biggest supporters want secure borders and for whom Bush's proposed guest-worker programme is a euphemism for amnesty. His argument that "guests" will do the work that Americans are unwilling to do is viewed as an insult to the many citizens already waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms, and suggests the same disconnect with working folk that plagued his father, who failed to recognise the scanner in a grocery store.

Not surprisingly, the most steadfast of his supporters are social conservatives who applaud Bush's court appointments - surely his most lasting legacy. By the end of his second term, Bush will have appointed more than half of the Appellate and US district judges. He is also more than likely to fill three seats on the US Supreme Court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Samuel A Alito Jr and at least one more, possibly the multiple-niche-filling Viet Dinh, a Harvard-educated Vietnamese-American law professor and former assistant attorney general.

Only Baghdad Bob would insist that Bush is doing swimmingly at his five-year marker, but only a pessimist would deny that the night is still young. The next three years may be enough time for Bush to reach an acceptable level of success in Iraq, which has to do more with leaving Iraqis in charge than in defeating every last insurgent/ terrorist. In the meantime, the president has accomplished much of what he promised, from arranging conservative courts to imposing trickle-down economic policies. Those distressed by his performance must have been dozing when the curtain rose on The Bush Show, Part II.

Howell Raines is the former editor of the New York Times and author of a forthcoming memoir, The One That Got Away

At this point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, and corporate influence over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign science - the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the modern era - amounts to a political legacy that could haunt the republic for years to come.

We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the "ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.

Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in America for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and social significance, given his animosity towards scholarly thought, he almost certainly does not understand.

Here is the big picture, as drawn by the Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. Starting in 1850, the Bushes, through alliance with the smarter Walker clan, built up a fortune based on classic robber-baron foundations: railroads, steel, oil, investment banking, armaments and materiel in the world wars. They had ties to the richest families of the industrial age - Rockefeller, Harriman, Brookings. Yet they never adopted the charitable, public-service ethic that developed in those families.

Starting with Senator Prescott Bush's alliance with Eisenhower and continuing through the dogged loyalty of his son, George HW Bush, to two more gifted politicians, Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the family has developed a prime rule of advancement. In a campaign, any accommodation, no matter how unprincipled, any attack on an opponent, no matter how false, was to be embraced if it worked.

The paradigm in its purest form was seen when the first President Bush, in 1980, renounced a lifelong belief in abortion rights to run as Reagan's vice-president. His son surpassed the father's dabbling with pork rinds and country music. He adopted the full agenda of redneck America - on abortion, gun control, Jesus - as a matter of convenience and, most frighteningly, as a matter of belief. Before the Bushes, American political slogans of the left and right embodied at least a grain of truth about how a presidential candidate would govern. The elder Bush's promise of a "kinder, gentler" America and the younger's "compassionate conservatism" brought us the political slogan as pure disinformation. They were asserting a claim of noblesse oblige totally foreign to their family history.

But whether Bush the father was pandering or Bush the son was praying, the underlying political trade-off was the same. The Bushes believe in letting the hoi polloi control the social and religious restrictions flowing from Washington, so long as Wall Street gets to say what happens to the nation's money. The Republican party as a national institution has endorsed this trade-off. What we do not know yet is whether a Republican party without a Bush at the top is seedy enough to keep it going. Americans have had an ambivalent attitude toward their aristocrats. They have also believed that dirty politics originated with populist machiavells such as Louisiana governor Huey Long and Chicago mayor Richard Daley. The Bushes, with such minders as Rove, Cheney and Delay, have turned that historic expectation upside down. Now our political deviance trickles down relentlessly from the top. The next presidential election will be a national test of whether the taint of Bushian tactics outlasts what is probably the last Bush to occupy the Executive Mansion.

In 1988, the first President Bush secured office by falsely depicting his opponent as a coddler of rapists and murderers. In 2000, the current President Bush nailed down the nomination by accusing John McCain of opposing breast-cancer research. He won in 2004 with a barrage of lies about John Kerry's war record.

With the right leadership, the US can stop the blood-letting in Iraq, regain its world standing, avert the crises in health care and social security, and even bring disaster relief to the Gulf Coast. But that's not simply a matter of keeping Bushes and Buxxxxes, with their impaired civic consciences, out of the White House. The next presidential campaign will show us whether these miscreant patricians have poisoned the well of the presidential campaign system. If so, there is no telling what we kind of president we might get.

Kitty Kelley is author of Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

George Bush became "born again" when the bottom dropped out of the oil boom in Midland, Texas. In the spring of 1984, the town's bank failed, fortunes crashed and overnight millionaires tumbled into life-wrecking debt. In a desperate effort to rescue lives and restore morale, the church elders invited the evangelist Arthur Blessitt to stage a revival. Blessitt was known as the man who had wheeled a 96lb cross of Jesus into 60 countries on six continents. Midland residents lined the streets during the day and watched Blessitt roll his 12ft-high cross through the boomtown gone bust.

Bush felt uncomfortable about attending the revival, but he listened to the broadcast. On the second day, he asked a friend to arrange a meeting with the evangelist at a coffee shop. Bush told Blessitt: "I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow him."

The evangelist quoted Mark and John and Luke to George, who held hands with the two men, repented his sins, and proclaimed Jesus Christ as his saviour. "It was an awesome and glorious moment," said Blessitt. He later wrote in his diary on April 3 1984: "A good and powerful day - Led Vice-President Bush's son to Jesus - George Bush Jr.!! This is great. Glory to God ..."

That conversion eventually led Bush to give up tobacco, alcohol and drugs at the age of 40, illustrating the wisdom of philosopher and psychologist William James (elder brother of the writer Henry), who said "the only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania".

Ever since Bush came to Jesus, his religion has ruled his life and, as president, his policies reflect his fierce religiosity. Within 48 hours of his first inaugural, he issued an executive order banning US government aid to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counselling. He also signed a bill that required that a foetus that showed signs of life following an abortion procedure be considered a person under federal law. He later signed a law prohibiting partial-birth abortion. The measure, which had been vetoed twice by President Clinton, was the most significant restriction on abortion rights in years. Federal judges in Nebraska, San Francisco and New York ruled that the law was unconstitutional, but Bush did not care. He had placated his evangelical base for his re-election.

By defining a foetus as a person, Bush had forced himself into taking a hard line against providing federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research - a decision that will hamper scientific research for decades. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, whose husband was dying of Alzheimer's, urged Bush to back stem-cell studies. Instead, he restricted federal funding to only 60 stem-cell lines, already in existence. He felt his compromise was the perfect political, if not moral, solution. He satisfied the religious right while giving something to moderates in his party who wanted the federal government to advance rather than hinder research into debilitating diseases.

Bush proposed several constitutional amendments to appeal to the 30 million evangelicals in the US, including a ban on same-sex marriage. By executive fiat he allowed contractors to use religious favouritism in their hiring practices. He also asked Congress to make it easier for federally funded groups to base their hiring decisions on a job candidate's religion and sexual orientation. The Rev Barry W Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the president had instituted "taxpayer-subsidised job discrimination" by allowing tax-payer-funded groups to hire and fire based on religious belief.

As president, Bush had crossed the constitutional line separating church and state. Within days of taking office, he made federal funds available to faith-based groups that provided social services. More than $1.1bn was disbursed by his administration to Christian groups. No Jews or Muslims received funds. Over time, W's "faith-based initiative" came to look like a political pay-off to church groups to keep them voting Republican. And it worked. In 2004, Bush was re-elected by 3.4 million religious conservatives, who, like him, oppose teaching evolution in schools, and insist on substituting a God-based version of "intelligent design".

From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, all presidents have invoked providence and appealed to a higher power, but Bush actually sees himself as a divine messenger. "I trust God speaks through me," he told an Amish community in Pennsylvania. "Without that I could not do my job." After 9/11, he told Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, "I believe God wants me to be president." After the World Trade Centre attacks, Time magazine reported that the president spoke of "being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment".

With messianic zeal, Bush took the country to war in Iraq against "evil doers" and, despite the lives lost and maimed, he, unlike a growing majority of Americans, has never questioned his policy. "Absolutely not," he said during the presidential debates. "It was the right decision."

R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr is the founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator

With his detumescent polls, his unpopular war and his faltering domestic policy, George Bush is very much in the sorry state that an earlier president, Harry S Truman, found himself when he left office in 1953. Truman's approval rating then was 23%, worse than Bush's present 38%. Truman was in a war he saw as an extension of the war against tyranny that his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, had fought and that Truman had successfully concluded. Then, too, he was engaged in consolidating FDR's New Deal, a consolidation that earned him the profound resentment of the Old Order that he and FDR had replaced, the Republicans.

Alhough Truman was viewed a failure, he is now esteemed as one of the "near-great" presidents. He was inspired in the 1940s by high-minded ideals, as was FDR, who perceived Hitler's threat to our civilisation perhaps even before Winston Churchill. Truman, too, was an enemy of tyranny; in March 1947, he told a joint session of Congress: "I believe that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

This was called the Truman Doctrine. Today, with minor emendations, it might be called the Bush Doctrine. Like Truman, Bush will be adjudged a failure or a success on the outcome of his "support of free peoples". His foreign policy is his greatest gambit.

It is not his foreign policy, however, that explains his weakness in the polls. At roughly 38%, it is down from his natural approval rating of 45-48%. The erosion has been from his conservative base. He was elected by the growing conservative disposition within America to consolidate the policies of the first epochal president since FDR - namely, Ronald Reagan. As FDR in 1933 began the age of big government in America, Reagan in 1981 began the era of alternatives to government. Bush came to the White House believing he would continue the Reagan regime. He has won significant victories - for instance, tax cuts that have led to 10 straight quarters of near 4% growth in GDP, with low unemployment and usually low inflation. He continued the Reagan policy of free trade with his Central American Free Trade Agreement, though he has occasionally parted with free trade for political expedience. With the successful nomination of John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and with at least one conservative justice on the way, he has continued the conservative drift in the judiciary.

Yet his conservative base feels he has failed to keep down spending. He has failed to champion various hot-button matters that ephemerally inflame each constituent group in the conservative amalgam: piety for the people of faith, deregulation for the economic conservatives, attention to immigration for the national security-conscious. But these are distractions. The main point is that Bush has to leave the presidency with a healthy economy, which he probably will, and stability and something like democratic government in Iraq, which I believe he is closer to achieving than his critics contend.

One thing is certain. He will leave the White House with many Americans furious with him, much as Truman did. Most of those who seethed at Truman were Republicans from the Old Order, with a few conservative Democrats along for the wrathful ride. Those who seethe at Bush are from America's present Old Order - to wit, Democrats, who have been steadily losing power nationwide and who now hold power mainly in the media and the universities.

They loathe this president. They are proud of their anger. The intensity of this anger is peculiar. After all, Bush's domestic policy is not that much different from Reagan's and his foreign policy is pretty much in line with the doctrine that Truman lent his name to and which FDR would indubitably have approved. How does one account for this dispendious wrath? More than principle or personal interest, politics is the domain of psychological need. In the case of Bush, the need of a passing Old Order to have enemies.

Dee Dee Myers is a political analyst and commentator, and a former White House press secretary in the Clinton administration

George Bush is talking again, and I don't have a clue what he's saying. It's not that he's mangling his syntax. That's par for the course. And while it's as amusing as it is disconcerting, I usually think I know what he's trying to say (though I do confess to being stumped by "more and more of our imports are coming from overseas").

Bush is talking about Iraq, which is always confusing for those of us who like our words and facts to match. He's saying he'll "settle for nothing less than total victory". And I'm wondering: what in the world is total victory? Does it mean large numbers of American troops will stay until Iraq is a fully functioning democracy with a vibrant economy and the political will to help spread freedom across the Middle East? That could take, like, 100 years. Or does it mean that we'll stay until we stand up enough Iraqi police officers and soldiers to claim with a straight face that they can handle their own security? That could mean substantial troop reductions in time to prevent total defeat in next year's mid-term elections. I just don't know.

But this is a familiar feeling for me. I think I know what something means - until I hear George Bush say it.

My trouble with Bush's words started early. When he was running for president in 2000, Bush said he was a "compassionate conservative". I thought I understood compassion and conservatism separately, but put them together and it might as well be cold fusion, a concept that, I confess, totally eludes me. Five years later, I'm still trying to get my head around it. I guess cutting income, estate and capital gains taxes is the compassionate part, since the cuts really help the rich, who did have it awfully tough during the Clinton years. Or perhaps that's the conservative part, because I'm pretty sure that adding $2.4trn to the national debt isn't.

Neither is vastly expanding the size of government. Bush says he's for "fiscal restraint". But during his first term, federal spending increased by $616.4bn - not that anyone's counting, in the wake of 9/11. Obviously, I'm not looking at this right. But even when I don't count the vast sums spent on defence and homeland security, Bush is still the most profligate president in 30 years; domestic spending alone is up 36%. OK, so maybe the Congress is to blame. Even though Republicans control the place, they don't seem to have got the message about "fiscal restraint"; they passed $91bn more in programmes than Bush requested during his first term. Surely Bush fought hard to slow them down, refusing to go along with their mountain of cockamamie spending measures? Or not, since he's the first president since John Quincy Adams (1825-29) to serve an entire term without vetoing a bill.

"Uniter" is another word that gives me trouble. Bush says he is one. Granted, he ran a campaign aimed at dividing the country, but who can blame a guy for wanting to win? He decided early on that he would forget about building a broad consensus for his second term. That kind of talk is for sissies, like John Kerry. Bush wanted a narrow victory, 50% plus one - and that's what he got. But after the election, he said he wanted to be president of all the people, even the dummies who didn't vote for him. And he welcomed us to just change our views so we could all agree together. That was pretty big of him.

My list of confusing words and concepts gets longer all the time. "Competence" is on the list. George Bush promised us he was the first MBA president and would run the White House with cold-eyed efficiency. And it's very reassuring to hear him say that from Iraq to New Orleans, the government is doing a "heck of a job". Ditto torture. The president says the United States doesn't torture. Boy, is that a relief. Now if only I had a new word for what I saw at Abu Ghraib. Let's not forget "energy policy". I'm sure there's a good reason why Bush's friends in the oil business ran up record profits while American consumers were choking on record prices.

I wish I had Bush's ability to tell all those voices in my head to shut up. Maybe I need to learn his squinty-eyed stare; it certainly seems to have had the desired effect on the press corps. I, too, want to believe that the world is black and white, that all problems have simple solutions, and that doubts are for the weak and faint-hearted. I, too, want to ignore complexity and laugh in the face of contradictory facts. I, too, want to be 14 again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1665822,00.html

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The Guardian newspaper asked six Americans for their views on George Bush's five years as president.

Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate.com and the author of the "Bushisms" series

George Bush seems less likely to be remembered as a disastrous American president than as an ultimately insignificant one. Despite his ambition to reshape American politics and society in the order of a Reagan or a Thatcher, Bush has presided over a period of national and economic drift that more closely resembles the forgettable reign of his father.

The main goal of the Bush presidency was to transform the American electorate by creating a durable Republican majority. Karl Rove, the architect of Bush's political career in Texas and Washington, has drawn an implicit analogy between his own role and that of the legendary fin-de-siècle political boss Mark Hanna, who served President William McKinley in the 1890s.

Hanna was McKinley's political brain in the way Rove is Bush's. McKinley was an affable, not-too-bright former congressman when Hanna helped to elect him governor of Ohio. In 1896, Hanna raised an unprecedented amount of money, and ran a ruthless and sophisticated campaign that got McKinley to the White House. One could go on with this analogy. McKinley governed negligently in the interests of big business and went to war on flimsy evidence that Spain had blown up the USS Maine.

The key to McKinley's success was the alliance Hanna forged between wealthy industrialists like himself, who provided cash, and workers, who provided votes. In the Bush version, the rich again provide the cash and religious conservatives provide the votes. The wealthy have been rewarded with tax cuts, the evangelicals with hard-line conservative policies on abortion, gay rights and a school prayer. Bush's re-election victory last year seemed to vindicate his and Rove's strategy of attempting to turn the country to the right. Though it was hardly a landslide, Bush did, unlike in 2000, win a genuine, popular endorsement of his policies.

But a year later, that re-election victory looks like an aberration, explained more by factors such as a weak Democratic opponent rather than any sea-change in American politics. Less than a year into Bush's second term, his approval rating has fallen to less than 40%, which approaches the nadir for any modern president at any moment in his tenure. This has happened at a time when the US economy, usually a reliable predicter of presidential popularity, has continued to grow robustly, oblivious to Bush's irresponsible fiscal policies and neglect of global competitiveness issues surrounding America's education and health care systems.

Many things have gone wrong for Bush, most notably everything that has happened in Iraq since he declared "Mission Accomplished" in the spring of 2003, but the underlying problem is his relationship to the rightwing constituency that elected him. Bush's debt to his big donors and to religious conservatives has boxed him in and pitted him against the national consensus on a range of issues. It has proven impossible for Bush to satisfy both the militant conservative base and the eternally moderate US electorate.

The president has never understood the brilliance of Ronald Reagan's way of dealing with this conflict. Reagan managed to appease the religious right with rhetoric, without actually forcing retrograde changes on divisive social issues. Reagan also placated conservatives by challenging the growth of the public sector. This is a theme Bush has soft-pedalled, preferring to allow federal spending and deficits to rise.

Whether because he is less adroit or because he truly believes what he says, Bush seems able to appease his conservative evangelical base only by surrendering to its wish-list. He has caved in to conservatives on issues including stem-cell research, pension privatisation and the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools. With his most recent Supreme Court nomination, Bush has given in further, creating at least the appearance that he is trying to get enough votes to remove the constitutional protection for abortion rights.

Through such choices, Bush propels his increasingly beleaguered administration further towards the right-hand margin - a place where his party cannot win future national elections. Possessed of the notion that he had won a mandate for radical change and enshrined a new governing majority, Bush lost sight of the eternal moderation of the American electorate. Now even rock-ribbed conservatives who face re-election next year are running away from any association with Bush because of his unpopularity.

When it comes to America's relations with the rest of the world, the damage Bush caused may take longer to repair, but his historic influence is unlikely to be any more durable. He will bequeath to our next president the remnants of a negligently planned entanglement in Iraq, but not any coherent American approach to foreign policy or international economics.

Kathleen Parker is a political commentator whose weekly column in the Orlando Sentinel is syndicated to more than 300 US newspapers

The marriage between President George Bush and his base is like any other - fraught with tensions and imperfections. So much so that, to appraise his popularity with those who brung 'em to the party, one might need to think in terms of the Ford Theatre's most infamous drama: "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Other than Bush's "fiddle-de-dee" Scarlett O'Hara approach to deficit spending ("I'll think about that tomorrow"), an immigration policy that threatens to turn the US into a private piñata for Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, and a fuzzy relationship with the religious right that has even Catholics lurching for the balcony ... he's still got a full orchestra pit.

Those most willing to give him a pass on domestic issues tend to be those who think it is critical that a Republican president restore conservatives to the federal courts, or who believe that the war in Iraq is of paramount importance, or who think both. And there still are plenty who do. These are the folks who, though they may share everyone's dismay that the war has dragged on at greater cost in blood and money than many expected, tend to see the war in Iraq as part of the second world war: not just a skirmish over oil or an exercise in daddy-revenge, but as a systemic approach to an enduring problem, a theatre in a wider war against a new and virulent fascism.

But his domestic policies have been a mixed bag - so that the conservative party has become divided over the central question of what it means to be a "conservative". Is it about protecting unborn life or keeping government out of personal decisions? Is it about preserving "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance or about freedom from all belief? Is conservatism about controlling government's appetites or about feeding the beast in the name of national security, even at the expense of civil liberties?

Thus, contradiction and paradox have become bedfellows in the Republican party's sleepover for the past five years. And much of the confusion stems from Bush's seminal decision - with the approval of the Congress, we feel compelled to note - to invade Iraq. It is hard to make a case for fiscal conservatism when you are underwriting a war. It is hard to keep government small when the mandate to prevent another 9/11 results in the creation of a mammoth new bureaucracy such as the Department of Homeland Security.

Bush's spending habits cannot be blamed entirely on the war. To true conservatives who vote Republican because they prefer limited government and low taxes, the president spends like a day-wager on a three-day drunk. His is the visionary perspective of a man for whom perfectionism is neither flaw nor pathology, but an achievable goal. Combine that philosophical perspective with the money-is-no-obstacle legacy of a born-rich kid, and you see Bush in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, no longer a mere compassionate conservative but His Majesty Comus astride his Mardi Gras float, tossing gold coins to the homeless and hungry.

Bush enjoys the further distinction of increasing spending more than his Democratic predecessor via passage of the pharmaceutical drug bill in 2003 - the largest entitlement since Medicare in 1965. And then there is his "No Child Left Behind" package that enhanced the federal government's role in education more than any measure since the 1960s.

Which is to say, a large portion of Bush's Republican base feels betrayed - even if some of their pain has been eased by recent reports of a healthy economy, new jobs, and a 20-year low in unemployment (5% as of this week). The tax cuts didn't hurt, either.

Bush's greatest failing may be his continued wooing of illegal immigrants at a time when his biggest supporters want secure borders and for whom Bush's proposed guest-worker programme is a euphemism for amnesty. His argument that "guests" will do the work that Americans are unwilling to do is viewed as an insult to the many citizens already waiting tables and cleaning hotel rooms, and suggests the same disconnect with working folk that plagued his father, who failed to recognise the scanner in a grocery store.

Not surprisingly, the most steadfast of his supporters are social conservatives who applaud Bush's court appointments - surely his most lasting legacy. By the end of his second term, Bush will have appointed more than half of the Appellate and US district judges. He is also more than likely to fill three seats on the US Supreme Court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Samuel A Alito Jr and at least one more, possibly the multiple-niche-filling Viet Dinh, a Harvard-educated Vietnamese-American law professor and former assistant attorney general.

Only Baghdad Bob would insist that Bush is doing swimmingly at his five-year marker, but only a pessimist would deny that the night is still young. The next three years may be enough time for Bush to reach an acceptable level of success in Iraq, which has to do more with leaving Iraqis in charge than in defeating every last insurgent/ terrorist. In the meantime, the president has accomplished much of what he promised, from arranging conservative courts to imposing trickle-down economic policies. Those distressed by his performance must have been dozing when the curtain rose on The Bush Show, Part II.

Howell Raines is the former editor of the New York Times and author of a forthcoming memoir, The One That Got Away

At this point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, and corporate influence over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign science - the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the modern era - amounts to a political legacy that could haunt the republic for years to come.

We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the "ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.

Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in America for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and social significance, given his animosity towards scholarly thought, he almost certainly does not understand.

Here is the big picture, as drawn by the Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. Starting in 1850, the Bushes, through alliance with the smarter Walker clan, built up a fortune based on classic robber-baron foundations: railroads, steel, oil, investment banking, armaments and materiel in the world wars. They had ties to the richest families of the industrial age - Rockefeller, Harriman, Brookings. Yet they never adopted the charitable, public-service ethic that developed in those families.

Starting with Senator Prescott Bush's alliance with Eisenhower and continuing through the dogged loyalty of his son, George HW Bush, to two more gifted politicians, Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the family has developed a prime rule of advancement. In a campaign, any accommodation, no matter how unprincipled, any attack on an opponent, no matter how false, was to be embraced if it worked.

The paradigm in its purest form was seen when the first President Bush, in 1980, renounced a lifelong belief in abortion rights to run as Reagan's vice-president. His son surpassed the father's dabbling with pork rinds and country music. He adopted the full agenda of redneck America - on abortion, gun control, Jesus - as a matter of convenience and, most frighteningly, as a matter of belief. Before the Bushes, American political slogans of the left and right embodied at least a grain of truth about how a presidential candidate would govern. The elder Bush's promise of a "kinder, gentler" America and the younger's "compassionate conservatism" brought us the political slogan as pure disinformation. They were asserting a claim of noblesse oblige totally foreign to their family history.

But whether Bush the father was pandering or Bush the son was praying, the underlying political trade-off was the same. The Bushes believe in letting the hoi polloi control the social and religious restrictions flowing from Washington, so long as Wall Street gets to say what happens to the nation's money. The Republican party as a national institution has endorsed this trade-off. What we do not know yet is whether a Republican party without a Bush at the top is seedy enough to keep it going. Americans have had an ambivalent attitude toward their aristocrats. They have also believed that dirty politics originated with populist machiavells such as Louisiana governor Huey Long and Chicago mayor Richard Daley. The Bushes, with such minders as Rove, Cheney and Delay, have turned that historic expectation upside down. Now our political deviance trickles down relentlessly from the top. The next presidential election will be a national test of whether the taint of Bushian tactics outlasts what is probably the last Bush to occupy the Executive Mansion.

In 1988, the first President Bush secured office by falsely depicting his opponent as a coddler of rapists and murderers. In 2000, the current President Bush nailed down the nomination by accusing John McCain of opposing breast-cancer research. He won in 2004 with a barrage of lies about John Kerry's war record.

With the right leadership, the US can stop the blood-letting in Iraq, regain its world standing, avert the crises in health care and social security, and even bring disaster relief to the Gulf Coast. But that's not simply a matter of keeping Bushes and Buxxxxes, with their impaired civic consciences, out of the White House. The next presidential campaign will show us whether these miscreant patricians have poisoned the well of the presidential campaign system. If so, there is no telling what we kind of president we might get.

Kitty Kelley is author of Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

George Bush became "born again" when the bottom dropped out of the oil boom in Midland, Texas. In the spring of 1984, the town's bank failed, fortunes crashed and overnight millionaires tumbled into life-wrecking debt. In a desperate effort to rescue lives and restore morale, the church elders invited the evangelist Arthur Blessitt to stage a revival. Blessitt was known as the man who had wheeled a 96lb cross of Jesus into 60 countries on six continents. Midland residents lined the streets during the day and watched Blessitt roll his 12ft-high cross through the boomtown gone bust.

Bush felt uncomfortable about attending the revival, but he listened to the broadcast. On the second day, he asked a friend to arrange a meeting with the evangelist at a coffee shop. Bush told Blessitt: "I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow him."

The evangelist quoted Mark and John and Luke to George, who held hands with the two men, repented his sins, and proclaimed Jesus Christ as his saviour. "It was an awesome and glorious moment," said Blessitt. He later wrote in his diary on April 3 1984: "A good and powerful day - Led Vice-President Bush's son to Jesus - George Bush Jr.!! This is great. Glory to God ..."

That conversion eventually led Bush to give up tobacco, alcohol and drugs at the age of 40, illustrating the wisdom of philosopher and psychologist William James (elder brother of the writer Henry), who said "the only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania".

Ever since Bush came to Jesus, his religion has ruled his life and, as president, his policies reflect his fierce religiosity. Within 48 hours of his first inaugural, he issued an executive order banning US government aid to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counselling. He also signed a bill that required that a foetus that showed signs of life following an abortion procedure be considered a person under federal law. He later signed a law prohibiting partial-birth abortion. The measure, which had been vetoed twice by President Clinton, was the most significant restriction on abortion rights in years. Federal judges in Nebraska, San Francisco and New York ruled that the law was unconstitutional, but Bush did not care. He had placated his evangelical base for his re-election.

By defining a foetus as a person, Bush had forced himself into taking a hard line against providing federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research - a decision that will hamper scientific research for decades. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, whose husband was dying of Alzheimer's, urged Bush to back stem-cell studies. Instead, he restricted federal funding to only 60 stem-cell lines, already in existence. He felt his compromise was the perfect political, if not moral, solution. He satisfied the religious right while giving something to moderates in his party who wanted the federal government to advance rather than hinder research into debilitating diseases.

Bush proposed several constitutional amendments to appeal to the 30 million evangelicals in the US, including a ban on same-sex marriage. By executive fiat he allowed contractors to use religious favouritism in their hiring practices. He also asked Congress to make it easier for federally funded groups to base their hiring decisions on a job candidate's religion and sexual orientation. The Rev Barry W Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the president had instituted "taxpayer-subsidised job discrimination" by allowing tax-payer-funded groups to hire and fire based on religious belief.

As president, Bush had crossed the constitutional line separating church and state. Within days of taking office, he made federal funds available to faith-based groups that provided social services. More than $1.1bn was disbursed by his administration to Christian groups. No Jews or Muslims received funds. Over time, W's "faith-based initiative" came to look like a political pay-off to church groups to keep them voting Republican. And it worked. In 2004, Bush was re-elected by 3.4 million religious conservatives, who, like him, oppose teaching evolution in schools, and insist on substituting a God-based version of "intelligent design".

From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, all presidents have invoked providence and appealed to a higher power, but Bush actually sees himself as a divine messenger. "I trust God speaks through me," he told an Amish community in Pennsylvania. "Without that I could not do my job." After 9/11, he told Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, "I believe God wants me to be president." After the World Trade Centre attacks, Time magazine reported that the president spoke of "being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment".

With messianic zeal, Bush took the country to war in Iraq against "evil doers" and, despite the lives lost and maimed, he, unlike a growing majority of Americans, has never questioned his policy. "Absolutely not," he said during the presidential debates. "It was the right decision."

R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr is the founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator

With his detumescent polls, his unpopular war and his faltering domestic policy, George Bush is very much in the sorry state that an earlier president, Harry S Truman, found himself when he left office in 1953. Truman's approval rating then was 23%, worse than Bush's present 38%. Truman was in a war he saw as an extension of the war against tyranny that his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, had fought and that Truman had successfully concluded. Then, too, he was engaged in consolidating FDR's New Deal, a consolidation that earned him the profound resentment of the Old Order that he and FDR had replaced, the Republicans.

Alhough Truman was viewed a failure, he is now esteemed as one of the "near-great" presidents. He was inspired in the 1940s by high-minded ideals, as was FDR, who perceived Hitler's threat to our civilisation perhaps even before Winston Churchill. Truman, too, was an enemy of tyranny; in March 1947, he told a joint session of Congress: "I believe that it must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

This was called the Truman Doctrine. Today, with minor emendations, it might be called the Bush Doctrine. Like Truman, Bush will be adjudged a failure or a success on the outcome of his "support of free peoples". His foreign policy is his greatest gambit.

It is not his foreign policy, however, that explains his weakness in the polls. At roughly 38%, it is down from his natural approval rating of 45-48%. The erosion has been from his conservative base. He was elected by the growing conservative disposition within America to consolidate the policies of the first epochal president since FDR - namely, Ronald Reagan. As FDR in 1933 began the age of big government in America, Reagan in 1981 began the era of alternatives to government. Bush came to the White House believing he would continue the Reagan regime. He has won significant victories - for instance, tax cuts that have led to 10 straight quarters of near 4% growth in GDP, with low unemployment and usually low inflation. He continued the Reagan policy of free trade with his Central American Free Trade Agreement, though he has occasionally parted with free trade for political expedience. With the successful nomination of John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and with at least one conservative justice on the way, he has continued the conservative drift in the judiciary.

Yet his conservative base feels he has failed to keep down spending. He has failed to champion various hot-button matters that ephemerally inflame each constituent group in the conservative amalgam: piety for the people of faith, deregulation for the economic conservatives, attention to immigration for the national security-conscious. But these are distractions. The main point is that Bush has to leave the presidency with a healthy economy, which he probably will, and stability and something like democratic government in Iraq, which I believe he is closer to achieving than his critics contend.

One thing is certain. He will leave the White House with many Americans furious with him, much as Truman did. Most of those who seethed at Truman were Republicans from the Old Order, with a few conservative Democrats along for the wrathful ride. Those who seethe at Bush are from America's present Old Order - to wit, Democrats, who have been steadily losing power nationwide and who now hold power mainly in the media and the universities.

They loathe this president. They are proud of their anger. The intensity of this anger is peculiar. After all, Bush's domestic policy is not that much different from Reagan's and his foreign policy is pretty much in line with the doctrine that Truman lent his name to and which FDR would indubitably have approved. How does one account for this dispendious wrath? More than principle or personal interest, politics is the domain of psychological need. In the case of Bush, the need of a passing Old Order to have enemies.

Dee Dee Myers is a political analyst and commentator, and a former White House press secretary in the Clinton administration

George Bush is talking again, and I don't have a clue what he's saying. It's not that he's mangling his syntax. That's par for the course. And while it's as amusing as it is disconcerting, I usually think I know what he's trying to say (though I do confess to being stumped by "more and more of our imports are coming from overseas").

Bush is talking about Iraq, which is always confusing for those of us who like our words and facts to match. He's saying he'll "settle for nothing less than total victory". And I'm wondering: what in the world is total victory? Does it mean large numbers of American troops will stay until Iraq is a fully functioning democracy with a vibrant economy and the political will to help spread freedom across the Middle East? That could take, like, 100 years. Or does it mean that we'll stay until we stand up enough Iraqi police officers and soldiers to claim with a straight face that they can handle their own security? That could mean substantial troop reductions in time to prevent total defeat in next year's mid-term elections. I just don't know.

But this is a familiar feeling for me. I think I know what something means - until I hear George Bush say it.

My trouble with Bush's words started early. When he was running for president in 2000, Bush said he was a "compassionate conservative". I thought I understood compassion and conservatism separately, but put them together and it might as well be cold fusion, a concept that, I confess, totally eludes me. Five years later, I'm still trying to get my head around it. I guess cutting income, estate and capital gains taxes is the compassionate part, since the cuts really help the rich, who did have it awfully tough during the Clinton years. Or perhaps that's the conservative part, because I'm pretty sure that adding $2.4trn to the national debt isn't.

Neither is vastly expanding the size of government. Bush says he's for "fiscal restraint". But during his first term, federal spending increased by $616.4bn - not that anyone's counting, in the wake of 9/11. Obviously, I'm not looking at this right. But even when I don't count the vast sums spent on defence and homeland security, Bush is still the most profligate president in 30 years; domestic spending alone is up 36%. OK, so maybe the Congress is to blame. Even though Republicans control the place, they don't seem to have got the message about "fiscal restraint"; they passed $91bn more in programmes than Bush requested during his first term. Surely Bush fought hard to slow them down, refusing to go along with their mountain of cockamamie spending measures? Or not, since he's the first president since John Quincy Adams (1825-29) to serve an entire term without vetoing a bill.

"Uniter" is another word that gives me trouble. Bush says he is one. Granted, he ran a campaign aimed at dividing the country, but who can blame a guy for wanting to win? He decided early on that he would forget about building a broad consensus for his second term. That kind of talk is for sissies, like John Kerry. Bush wanted a narrow victory, 50% plus one - and that's what he got. But after the election, he said he wanted to be president of all the people, even the dummies who didn't vote for him. And he welcomed us to just change our views so we could all agree together. That was pretty big of him.

My list of confusing words and concepts gets longer all the time. "Competence" is on the list. George Bush promised us he was the first MBA president and would run the White House with cold-eyed efficiency. And it's very reassuring to hear him say that from Iraq to New Orleans, the government is doing a "heck of a job". Ditto torture. The president says the United States doesn't torture. Boy, is that a relief. Now if only I had a new word for what I saw at Abu Ghraib. Let's not forget "energy policy". I'm sure there's a good reason why Bush's friends in the oil business ran up record profits while American consumers were choking on record prices.

I wish I had Bush's ability to tell all those voices in my head to shut up. Maybe I need to learn his squinty-eyed stare; it certainly seems to have had the desired effect on the press corps. I, too, want to believe that the world is black and white, that all problems have simple solutions, and that doubts are for the weak and faint-hearted. I, too, want to ignore complexity and laugh in the face of contradictory facts. I, too, want to be 14 again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1665822,00.html

Out of all the varied views expressed above, my vote for most insightful analysis goes to Howell Raines, I believe that in the future political commentary by those 'across the divide' (Ex. Dee Dee Myers above) will come under increasingly more stringent analysis by the reader as to 'objectivity' in light of the current political maelstorm in America. (I am not being critical of Myer's comments at all, they are in my opinion insightful, I am just giving an example).

Perhaps the only observation that I can make that would be noteworthy, is that as an American, having lived in the US for 47 years, it is my perception that the 'average American' is 'beyond fed up' with the shrill tone of what is considered (or passed off as) political discourse. But getting back to the point, my prediction is that American's have become so cynical and distrustful regarding politics in general, that success or failure in Iraq (and if he can finish his term w/o a 'major terrorist attack on US soil'), will be the ultimate yardstick by which 'the people' will judge George W. Bush, excepting the economy.

The reason being is that despite all the criticism, I believe American's whether to the right, or to the left are caring people; in this context meaning the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. All of them have families here that irrespective of political outlook want to see them come back, alive and without the added colossus of being seen as anything other than honorable people who served their country, also irregardless of whether the 'war' was 'justified' based on what we all know (i.e. the 'W..M.D.' issue).

Before anyone criticizes me about calling the troops honorable in light of Abu Ghraib, I would say it is not level headed to condemn soldiers who were not party to those events, along with those who were. I would also say that it is my perception that whoever said that those "responsible for the policy', should be held to a more vigorous accounting than those who were caught (England, etc..) probably knows more about events behind the scenes than all the self-proclaimed experts in the media.

The people of the world and American's in particular, have paid through the nose for George Bush before he has even left office, the 'real cost' of the war, in dollars and cent's doesen't even kick in until after he leaves office (how convenient!). Not to mention, whether the world is a 'safer place' (I bet I speak for a lot of people when I say it will at least be safer because he will no longer be President, and not because of what he 'accomplished' while Commander In Chief)

As a result of the Bush Doctrine, the world situation, already fraught with tensions in regards to North Korea, the ever violatle Middle East and the ascension of China as both an economic and military power, is compounded by a 'psuedo-Crusade slant' to the ostensible 'War on Terror', a direct result of the Iraq conflict, which, regardless of whether you agree or disagree, is percieved by many countries in the rest of the world as being -

A. Unjustified, in light of the absence of W.M.D.'s

B. A product of the neo-conservatives "Project for the New American Century."

C. Just good-old fashioned desires in the power-elite of this country for 'American hegemony in the world."

or

D. All of the above.

Can you imagine how much damage could have been avoided if the military action had stopped after Afghanistan, and a resolute campaign to manifest American resolution against terrorism across the board was the design instead of toppling Saddam? Our prestige would certainly be basically intact, it certainly isn't anymore.

The right wing was laughing to scorn media comparisons to Vietnam in 2003, but they aren't laughing anymore.

Edited by Robert Howard
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I think Bush's presidency will ultimately go down as being quite significant, but I think it will be for the harm he caused in international stability, American foreign policy, and American fiscal policy.

He has been extremely successful at accomplishing major goals as a president.

I believe the world no longer is content to see the US as a benevolent superpower and that we are on a longer range course to return to balance of power politics and there is more significant chance of a 21st century war between major powers (World War III) because of his policies.

Between tax cuts, the huge costs of war, spending increases and tilting the American economy to favor the super wealthy even more than it already had, the Bush administration is sending the country into a fiscal and economic crisis on top of the problem that already looms ahead as the government has set the example for businesses by bankrupting the national pension accounts and having to pay as we go in the future because we already spent the money that was to be dedicated to Social Security.

I wish he would be remembered as Clinton or his father as a mediocre, little-noted President. I think he will be remembered differently.

Of course IF he hits the Home Run and achieves peace and democracy in the Middle East, he will go down in history as one of the greatest American presidents. :tomatoes

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Bush confronted a popular two-term Democratic president credited with peace and prosperity. Clinton's vice president was his natural successor. Republican positions on domestic policy were almost uniformly unpopular.

As governor of Texas, Bush turned his inexperience in national government into a virtue: he was outside the fray and free of its rancour. The Republicans had shut down the federal government twice and impeached Clinton. Bush promised to "change the tone in Washington". He said that he was "a uniter, not a divider".

It was Bush who first assumed the mantle of "compassionate conservatism". He picked a fight with the draconian Republican house majority leader, Tom DeLay, who was against Clinton's programme for deferring tax-credit payments to the working poor. He also distanced himself from some of his own party's positions on social issues, saying that the Republicans had too often portrayed "America as slouching toward Gomorrah".

Bush appeared to reject the right-wing economic hard line, instead emphasising issues associated with the Democrats such as education. It was essential for him to try to erase Democratic management of the economy from the campaign. Under Clinton, 22 million jobs were created, poverty reduced by one-quarter, and the greatest deficit had been replaced by the greatest budget surplus. Bush fostered the notion that none of this had happened as a result of difficult policy decisions and that the economy ran on automatic pilot.

Bush's press conference to announce he would not answer questions about his past drug use and alcoholism made him an empathetic figure of his generation in contrast with traditional Republican troglodytes. And the attacks on Bush as shallow, simplistic and ignorant only contributed to the image of the scion as a man of the people.

In order to shift discussion away from Bush's proposals, which were not generally accepted, he strained to make the election a contest of personalities. Al Gore was painted as hopelessly dour, dull and dutiful. His mastery of policy was turned into an object of derision, a nerdy quirk. Before the debates, the formidable Gore was depicted as mean, nasty and unfair. Gore was finally goaded into taking the bait and tried to demonstrate his niceness by agreeing with the nice Bush. Clinton had advised relentlessly drawing the sharpest possible differences on policy but was ignored, and nearly tore his hair out.

Once in office, a closed, harsh and ideological president replaced the seemingly open-minded, tolerant and pragmatic candidate.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1667429,00.html

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Of course IF he hits the Home Run and achieves peace and democracy in the Middle East, he will go down in history as one of the greatest American presidents. :tomatoes

I think that there's a difference between how Presidents are remembered in the US and how they're remembered in other parts of the world. I've noticed, for example, that Reagan - and even Nixon - are remembered quite fondly in the US, but out here in the rest of the world, I think there are plenty of people who remember particularly Reagan as a right-wing ideologue who did immense damage to the US economy and the respect for international law in world (remember mining Nicaraguan harbours, whilst maintaining an embassy in Managua - imagine if the Nicaraguans had done the same in New York), rather than, ultimately, as the Gipper who managed to 'end the Cold War'.

I think you'd need to be a fairly blinkered right-winger out here in the rest of the world to be able to discern any good effects of the Bush presidency …

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Oh come one. If someone achieves Pease in the Middle East they will rank with Jesus the Carpenter and Mohammad.

Reagan is remembered fairly well here in the United States but I think historicaly he is seen as having significant limitations. But for the 25 eyars of presidencies he is surrounded by either way he is a highlight.

Nixon is not well remembered here except by ideologues who conveniently also froget he was a moderate.

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Oh come one. If someone achieves Pease in the Middle East they will rank with Jesus the Carpenter and Mohammad.

Reagan is remembered fairly well here in the United States but I think historicaly he is seen as having significant limitations. But for the 25 eyars of presidencies he is surrounded by either way he is a highlight.

Nixon is not well remembered here except by ideologues who conveniently also froget he was a moderate.

Raymond

I have tried reading your recent post several times...... are you dyslexic?

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Once in office, a closed, harsh and ideological president replaced the seemingly open-minded, tolerant and pragmatic candidate.

That's because his presidency was hijacked from the git-go by the PNAC, a war-loving neocon think tank (its members including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush) which the people who voted for Dubya had never heard of, if Dubya had ever heard of it himself.

This virtual coup d'etat was set in motion when Halliburton's Cheney, chosen to pick a VP running mate for Bush, chose himself. Cheney's friend Stuart Spencer described this with admiration as "the most Machiavellian f**king thing I've ever seen" (quoted by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker). And in less than a year after Bush's inauguration, his PNAC handlers had their "new Pearl Harbor," a catastrophe they had virtually wished for (in the 2000 PNAC position paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses") to speed up their militaristic dreams of the "transformation of warfare" and "Pax Americana," an imperialistic program euphemistically referred to as "expanding the zones of democratic peace" (or as Bush now refers to it, "spreading freedom").

That the six Americans who were chosen by the Guardian to write about Bush's first five years ignored this reality of his administration would be astounding if it weren't predictably symptomatic of a nation in denial about what is happening to it.

Edited by Ron Ecker
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Oh come one. If someone achieves Pease in the Middle East they will rank with Jesus the Carpenter and Mohammad.

Reagan is remembered fairly well here in the United States but I think historicaly he is seen as having significant limitations. But for the 25 eyars of presidencies he is surrounded by either way he is a highlight.

Nixon is not well remembered here except by ideologues who conveniently also froget he was a moderate.

Raymond

I have tried reading your recent post several times...... are you dyslexic?

What no dog to kick today?

I'll clarify.

If Bush accomplishes what he says he is going to accomplish by bringing democracy and peace to the Middle East he will likely be regarded as one of the greatest leaders in the history of the world.

Reagan has a good reputation among many Americans and is celebrated as a highlight and icon of the neoconservative movement.

American historians tend to acknowledge his charisma and his association with reviving the American self-image, but they also note the failings of his administration. Historians are not tending to rank him as one of the greatest presidents.

Considering the mediocrity that surrounds Reagan’s presidency for years on each side it is understandable that Reagan would be considered the best president of the last forty years.

Nixon, on the other hand, has a devoted core of long term defenders. There is a way of arguing that Nixon made the trains run on time (as they say, that's not too abstract for you is it?). But in reality Nixon was one of the greatest dangers to the American democracy in our history. In short he is not well thought of.

I also made the point that Republican ideologues defend him even though politically he was a moderate.

And now I will cut and paste to a spell checker because I have the time and I am not in the middle of taking care of three small children. (This seems to bring on my dyslexia)

If you are giving out Christmas presents, a spell-check feature would be grand for us diselxics,

Cheers

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It's been interesting seeing the intellectual twists and turns of conservatives in Sweden over the Bush administration. As in most countries, the dominant parts of the media are either explicitly or implicitly conservative editorially (bear in mind that 'neo-con' in Europe is called 'neo-liberal', so the European label 'liberal' denotes someone on the right, not on the left).

Swedish conservatives usually have pro-Americanism as their unchanging core value, no matter what kind of pro-Americanism it is. Thus, in a country which is profoundly distrustful of international military alliances, Swedish conservatives have a knee-jerk 'Sweden must join NATO' reaction to any international event which involves armies (there are plenty of Swedish conservatives who want Sweden to send troops to Iraq, for example).

But the poor things have no idea what to think of Dubya: it's hard to thump the tub for an administration which is so clearly deficient, and which has so clearly blown chance after chance in Iraq. Fiscal responsibility is also a guiding principle for conservatives here (although, just like conservatives in other countries, they aren't so good at following this principle when they get into power). Whatever else you say about the Bush administration, 'fiscally responsible' isn't likely to be part of it …

Edited by David Richardson
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My question: do you see any parallels between the Kennedys end-run around the CIA with the Special Group and Bush's similar? end-run in 2003, when the neo-cons ran the Iraq intelligence out of the Pentegon?

There is a very interesting dynamic between President Bush's conflicts with the CIA, and President Kennedy's. On the surface, it appears that President Bush has succeeded in taming the CIA, exactly what President Kennedy attempted to do, and which cost him his life. Yet: the political positions have been reversed. The political position of the CIA during President Kennedy's time - supported by the Pentagon, (what Jim Garrison called "the War Machine") was for a ground war, if not in Cuba, then, better yet, in Vietnam. That President Kennedy would not support that ground war, in large part because he was opposed to the deficit that would result, played a large role in his demise, along with his opposition to the extraordinary powers being exercised by the CIA. Students might be interested in the fact that President Eisenhower defined "national security" as, in part, avoiding a huge deficit and a bankrupted economy.

The CIA by the time of the current President had a policy much more similar to the cautious views of President Kennedy. It discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and said so. It warned against a protracted Occupation in Iraq; it recognized that an American invasion in Iraq would result in a civil war....Because President Bush was furthering pro-war policies similar to those advanced by the CIA in President Kennedy's time, he shattered the CIA into the thousand pieces - exactly what President Kennedy had threatened to do. The clandestine service was eviscerated. The Director of Central Intelligence no longer was to meet with the President on a daily basis and a Director of National Intelligence was appointed. The Pentagon of course remains the same in its furthering the interests of what President Eisenhower warned against, the military-industrial complex.

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Sure, these are likely to become partisan talking points, but at least they are from the mouth of the POTUS.

It seems in selling the Patriot Act Bush has offered apparently contradictory statements about judicial oversight of these searches. In these remarks he seems to be saying that the Patriot Act powers are carefully monitored. His recent remarks, as far as I can tell, say the opposite.

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

White House

Q -- coming next year. And I find that an important tool for protecting America. And in Wisconsin here, we have Senator Russ Feingold, as you're aware, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Wondering if you can tell us all here the importance of the Patriot Act and what we can do to help get that renewed.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me -- that's a great question. A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.

Now, we've used things like roving wiretaps on drug dealers before. Roving wiretaps mean you change your cell phone. And yet, we weren't able to use roving wiretaps on terrorists. And so what the Patriot Act said is let's give our law enforcement the tools necessary, without abridging the Constitution of the United States, the tools necessary to defend America.

President's Remarks at Ask President Bush Event

I'll tell you another good thing that happened. Before September the 11th, investigators had better tools to fight organized crime than to fight international terrorism. That was the reality. For years, law enforcement used so-called roving wire taps to investigate organized crime. You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.

President Bush Calls for Renewing the USA PATRIOT Act

The Patriot Act is helping America defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all our people. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Under the act, law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone or search his property. Congress also oversees our use of the Patriot Act. Attorney General Gonzales delivers regular reports on the Patriot Act to the House and the Senate.

President's Radio Address

The Patriot Act Helps Law Enforcement Fight Terrorism While Safeguarding Civil Liberties For All Americans. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers must seek a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, track his calls, or search his property. These strict standards are fully consistent with the Constitution. Congress also oversees the application of the Patriot Act, and in more than three years there has not been a single verified abuse.

Fact Sheet: Giving Law Enforcement the Tools They Need to Safeguard Our Homeland

Finally, we need to renew the critical provisions of the Patriot Act that protect our civil liberties. The Patriot Act was written with clear safeguards to ensure the law is applied fairly. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the U.S.

Congress also oversees the application of the Patriot Act. Congress has recently created a federal board to ensure that the Patriot Act and other laws respect privacy and civil liberties. And I'll soon name five talented Americans to serve on that board. Attorney General Gonzales delivers regular reports on the Patriot Act to the House and the Senate, and the Department of Justice has answered hundreds of questions from members of Congress. One Senator, Dianne Feinstein of California, has worked with civil rights groups to monitor my administration's use of the Patriot Act. Here's what she said: "We've scrubbed the area, and I have no reported abuses." Remember that the next time you hear someone make an unfair criticism of this important, good law. The Patriot Act has not diminished American liberties; the Patriot Act has helped to defend American liberties.

President Discusses Patriot Act

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