Originally posted by TOC:
Just for the record, Roger. Considering we have seen a lot of problems during Bush's two terms - the enormous accumulation of wealth among the richest Americans and the simultaneous shrinking earnings of middle- and low-income Americans, the housing bubble, the Wall Street crisis, the American budget deficit, the sinking of New Orleans, the slow rotting of American infrasturcture, the climate change with increasing drought in large parts of the United States, the growth of international terrorism, the geographical juxtaposition of Osama bin Laden and the bomb (both are to be found in America's ally, Pakistan), the diminishing status of the United states abroad - is there anything you blame Bush or any other important Republican for? Anything at all?
Ann
Hmm, where to start. You incorrectly make the assumption that I think George W. Bush is flawless and is guilty of doing nothing wrong just because I don't criticize him every five minutes. As with Bill Clinton, i will praise him when he's right and I will criticize him when he's wrong. I defend him mostly because no one else will to any significant degree.
Well, here's a start to that list... and it's a long one.
* He started off his administration very poorly by trying to make friends with Ted Kennedy. That gesture led to Kennedy essentially writing the "No Child Left Behind Act" that has so many flaws it's ridiculous. The only thing that would have given teeth to the bill would have been school choice and merit pay for teachers and those were left out of the final bill. Never trust a Kennedy!
* Another poor start to his administration was the imposition of steel tariffs to help the steel industry against cheap imports. As a professed free market trader, he violated his own principles by imposing these. The tariffs eventually had to be removed as the WTO ruled against them.
* In the battle for Afghanistan, he gave far too much power to the lawyers who had to approve every single action taken there (and in Iraq, too, for that matter). The delay cost us our chance to kill Mullah Omar in 2001 when we had his convoy in our sights. A single Predator missile and he would have been taken out.
* He did not continue with his stated policy of a tax cut every year. While he had a good tax cut in 2001 that got us out of the dot com bust and had a decent capital gains tax cut in 2003, after that, nothing. While those tax cuts were taking effect, our economy improved considerably, millions of jobs were created, and the deficit fell in half. Conservatives take tax cuts very seriously and will remember that when election time comes when a Republican goes against his promises. Just look at 1992 and 2006 as examples where the Republican voters came out to fire their incumbents.
* When he did get tax cuts passed, he didn't push hard to make them permanent when they were first enacted. Instead he acquiesced to antiquated Senate rules which allowed sunset provisions to be put into the bill. So rather than having a permanent tax cut people could count on to still be there in the future, people and businesses had to hedge for the possibility that the tax cuts will expire and people will see an enormous tax increase. So now we have two presidential candidates running around claiming they're going to cut middle class taxes when all they'll really do is keep rates right where they are, assuming they even follow through on the promises, which I doubt. That's not a tax cut.
* With Republican control of Congress before our current oil prices started skyrocketing, he should have successfully lobbied for opening offshore drilling and ANWR years ago. Some Republicans resisted, but a deal should still have been done. Enough conservative Democrats signed on to make it bipartisan. Instead, Bush mentioned it for a while but never fought for it. We'd be better off today if that oil was producing now.
* He had a comprehensive energy policy that included new nuclear reactors, new electrical infrastructure for replacing our aging ones, additional refineries, and new drilling as well as huge spending on alternative energy. He barely tried to get it passed. If he had succeeded with Republicans in control of the White House and Capitol Hill, it should have been doable. We would be on our way to lessening foreign dependency on energy instead of stuck in the mud like we are now with oil still at exorbitant prices.
* Bush failed to defend the US dollar. When the dollar first started falling, the markets had the perception, probably correctly, that President Bush supported a weak dollar. So rather than using the Treasury Department to send signals to the market on US intentions to support the dollar even if only just with words, he did nothing and watched while the dollar tanked. Perception matters a lot in the markets. By acquiescing, Bush only served to make the dollar fall further and harder. Only recently when people finally figured out the US economy was stronger than the rest of the world and always has been did the dollar begin to appreciate again. While a weak dollar is good for exports, it didn't help in the long run with our current accounts deficit with oil rising to a high of $147/barrel for Light, Sweet Crude, more than offsetting our large export gains in other areas.
* He did not fire Donald Rumsfeld, General George Casey, and General John Abizaid soon enough. Those men were the architects of the minimum force necessary policy and stuck to it to the bitter end even though it was plain progress wasn't being made. Once he fired them and replaced them with Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, the war in Iraq started going our way, and in a hurry. Unfortunately, now it's too late and his popularity rating is still mired at 30%, making him an anchor on Republicans in 2008.
* Marine General Peter Pace and Admiral Mike Mullen were terrible choices for Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those men didn't have a clue how to win in Iraq and stood in the way of General Petraeus with petty requests for justification every time Petraeus sent in requisitions for men or materiel since they both opposed the Surge in Iraq, going against their Commander-in-Chief's strategy once the minimalist strategy was rejected. When the president had to finally go around those men by using retired General Jack Keane as a direct conduit between Petraeus and Bush, those men tried to curtail Keane's movements to cut off communications. Once Bush knew of their betrayal, he should have fired them immediately. Mullen is still Chairman, for some unknown reason.
* President Bush tried too hard to be unlike Lyndon Johnson, who was accused of being so involved in military decision-making that he jokingly said he had to give permission for every latrine that was dug in Vietnam. By being too deferential to his generals, he came close to losing Iraq. His generals, who had trained to fight the Soviet Union, hadn't a clue on how to fight an insurgency and win. He should have realized their strategy wasn't working much sooner and gone to a new plan.
* We should have asked Iraq to pay for part of our war effort. I understand Bush wanted to show that we weren't there for oil, but the Iraqis should have at least paid for part of the cost of the war. Instead, they've essentially paid nothing so far and get $75 billion a year in oil revenues. Even a quarter of that would have helped to offset some of the costs.
* He implicitly admitted that Guantanamo was a place of torture by saying that it should be shut down at first opportunity, playing into his enemies' hands. Every visitor to Guantanamo, including the Red Cross, has said that the prisoners there were better off than people in many of America's prisons. Basically Bush had no communications skills and was ineffective in fending off the torture charge. What he should have done was to make it a place for prisoners to fear. Instead, many prisoners gained weight and got better care than our own prison population.
* We should have killed al Sadr when we had the chance after four contractors were brutally killed and dragged through the streets of Fallujah. When the Mahdi Militia first raised its ugly head, we should have cut it off in Fallujah. Instead we sent in an Iraqi colonel who was actually sympathetic to al Sadr's cause. We should have gone in there with overwhelming force and killed him. If he wanted to be a martyr, by all means oblige him. Instead, al Sadr's been a pain in our side for years and has caused the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers.
* He appointed Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. While she was a decent lawyer, she wasn't Supreme Court material. Fortunately Republicans stopped the appointment and we got Samuel Alito, an excellent pick who doesn't legislate from the bench by making law out of whole cloth.
* He gave up way too easily on reforming Social Security and Medicare, the two time bombs that will detonate sometime within most of our lifetimes that will make Fannie Mae look like a school child who lost her lunch money instead of the $1.5 trillion it will eventually cost our economy. With the power of the presidency and the bully pulpit, he should have gone after that third rail of politics hard. Usually President Bush does what he thinks is best regardless of the cost to himself, but in this case he took the coward's way out. In this, I blame the entire Republican leadership for cowardice.
* We should have given Israel our IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes so that they could take out Iran's nuclear capabilities if they were confident of success. Instead, by depriving them of our IFF codes, Israel was unable to launch any attack since they would have been attacked by our own fighters.
* President Bush did an extremely poor job communicating what really happened during Hurricane Katrina, whether it be through surrogates or direct contacts with the media. He knew the media were unjustly painting him with blame for all the failures that happened, but he didn't have any idea how to get the word out about what really happened. Instead he let the media paint him as an incompetent, essentially killing the rest of his presidency. That was the moment President Bush became a true lame duck president. To make matters worse, he apologized for the failures of the federal government, making the media look like they were right.
* The president failed to communicate the discovery of WMD in Iraq. Regardless of whether they were small in number compared to what was expected (roughly 500 warheads discovered), he should have immediately made it public with an a press conference. Instead the administration buried it. When Senator Rick Santorum and Representative Pete Hoekstra asked the president's people why, they were told that the administration was tired of being beaten up by the media and didn't think they could win the media battle after already losing it the first time. Hello! Bully pulpit! The presidency!?!? Ronald Reagan never flinched at that kind of challenge. The Great Non-Communicator. Hmph.
* The president signed onto a horrible Democratic plan to give tax rebate checks to people with the economy beginning to go south. Clearly that didn't work as I had said it wouldn't. A demand-side solution never works. Even though he was a lame duck, he should have painted the Democrats as do-nothings and tried to get a good tax cut passed. A good tax cut goes a lot farther than a brief one-time only rebate check.
* The president agreed to sign a bill for a minimum wage increase to $6.55 in the midst of a declining economy. That will only serve to hurt the economy more and cost more jobs.
* He and the Republicans in Congress broke their promises to restrain spending. 2006 was the voters' revenge.
* When the New York Times spilled the beans about our secret program to track terrorist finances, Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller should have been thrown in jail immediately and been charged with treason. By not reacting to this treason, the rest of the media felt free to also spill our secrets, such as our wiretapping programs among others. Abraham Lincoln and FDR never hesitated to jail domestic enemies during wartime. Lincoln even expelled a sitting member of Congress, exiling Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandingham to Canada. There's a joke that goes around about how bin Laden has the cheapest intelligence service in the world that helps him find out what his enemies are doing. All he has to do is to go out and buy a copy of the New York Times for $1 a day. All previous presidents during a period of wartime imposed restrictions on the media except this president for unknown reasons.
* Worst of all of the above is a failure to communicate about Iraq in general. He was far too passive, letting his enemies define him rather than always taking the offensive against the media. Ronald Reagan knew that 90% of the media was against him. He didn't care. He went over their heads to the American people and explained things simply and with conviction. President Bush, instead, went into hiding as Democrats and the press started accusing him of lying about the justifications for war. With the power of the bully pulpit, he could have made mincemeat of the Democrats. Instead he let them paint him as a liar all in the spirit of bipartisanship. By trying to be bipartisan, he stayed silent while watching his enemies destroy him. When he finally decided to fight back, he was too late. His enemies had already successfully defined him. It didn't matter that commission after commission, such as the Robb-Silbermann Commission, the 9/11 Commission, the Butler Commission, etc. always found that no lies were told. When one side attacks and the other side doesn't respond, the attacker always wins.
Is that enough, Ann? I have more, but perhaps you see the point. Despite the problems I have with President Bush, he has one quality that makes him the ideal leader for this War on Terror. He wants to win and doesn't care what happens to him in order to win. Bush has been so successful in the War on Terror that people feel safe. Because they feel safe, other concerns go to the top of the public consciousness. People feel so safe that too many are willing to possibly elect the worst possible president we can have during a time of war, Barack Obama.
I think history will judge President Bush far differently than the electorate currently does. Outside the prism of partisan politics, historians, I believe, will one day look on his presidency as a landmark one, a presidency that laid the groundwork for victory against terrorists and for eventual peace in the Middle East. To support this, I will post a subsequent narrative comparing how another president fared with public opinion and how history sees him today. That may take a while, though, since it'll be rather long.
