History will not be kind to G. W. Bush - Jonathan Bernstein

[Sir Purrcival]

Yep, lets call it a day. I may not agree with you on a lot of things but value the discussions.

[WestCoastJoe]

History will not be kind to George W. Bush

Posted by Jonathan Bernstein on April 25, 2013 at 12:36 pm

George W. Bush is not remembered with any enthusiasm currently. That’s not likely to change.

Whatever way it’s measured, he’s not doing too well. Gallup has his retrospective approval at 47 percent; that’s third-lowest in the polling era, better than only Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson (Harry Enten has more on placing post-presidential approval in context). As far as historians and other students of the presidency, it’s even worse; Bush falls in the bottom quarter of the ratings surveys in which he’s been included.

In terms of popular appeal in the short term, Bush will likely be hurt because there’s no campaign underway to improve his reputation — either by himself, as was the case with Nixon and is still the case with Jimmy Carter, or on his behalf, as with John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. We don’t really have a way of measuring the effects of those campaigns, and Nixon’s hasn’t worked, but it certainly seems likely to help to some extent. Bush’s best hope as far as popularity is probably for his brother, nephew or some other family member to become president and excel, which somehow rubs off on him. That’s not much of a hope.

It’s highly unlikely that Bush’ll improve much with historians, political scientists and other experts — and not just because, as Neil Sinhababu astutely points out, he’ll be hurt for a long while by the age demographics of those professions.

The problem for Bush is that the headline policies — management of the economy and of foreign relations, the latter dominated by war in Iraq — don’t look good now and aren’t likely to look any better any time soon. I can’t think of a war that looked like a failure 10 years after it was launched that historians later decided was a success after all; that certainly wasn’t the case with Vietnam, for example. I can imagine historians coming to many different conclusions about the Bush administration’s reaction to financial collapse in fall 2008, but at best that’s going to be a story of “it could have been worse.”

It’s unlikely that Bush will score high on secondary issues. All wartime presidents except James Madison have poor records on civil liberties issues, records that matter more after time has elapsed than they do for (most) contemporaries. Torture, in particular, is going to be a terrible mark against Bush. It’s also very possible that inaction on climate will wind up a much larger part of his historical legacy than it seems right now. Secondary issues on which Bush seems to have good marks — education reform, for example — seem less likely to become more important over time.

Moreover, what we know now of Bush’s decision-making process — his “presidenting” — does not seem likely to appeal to future historians. That makes it less likely that they will be willing to excuse unfortunate outcomes during the Bush years as difficult circumstances he navigated reasonably well. Indeed, it’s perhaps more likely that over time the Sept. 11 attacks will be thought of as a mark against Bush than, as his supporters like to think, his finest hour.

The general opinion about George W. Bush right now is that he was overmatched by the job. I don’t see any reason to believe that’s going to change.

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An unnecessary war in Iraq. An unnecessary war in Afghanistan. Insufficient care for war veterans. Budget deficits. Choosing Dick Cheney as V.P. (after V.P. search coordinator Cheney recommended himself). Giving Muslim extremists great motivation for revenge (huge boost to the jihadist recruitment process). Tax breaks for the rich.

What's not to like about his record?

Just my views. Your views may be different, and so the difference will remain.

[WestCoastJoe]

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Bush’s legacy keeps getting worse

By Eugene Robinson,

Thursday, April 25, 4:53 PM

In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse.

I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man — now that he’s no longer in the White House.

But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of his worst decisions left on our country’s honor: torture.

Hiding behind the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Bush made torture official U.S. policy. Just about every objective observer has agreed with this stark conclusion. The most recent assessment came this month in a 576-page report from a task force of the bipartisan Constitution Project, which stated that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.”

We knew about the torture before Bush left office — at least, we knew about the waterboarding of three “high-value” detainees involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. But the Constitution Project task force — which included such figures as Asa Hutchinson, who served in high-ranking posts in the Bush administration, and William Sessions, who was FBI director under three presidents — concluded that other forms of torture were used “in many instances” in a manner that was “directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.”

Bush administration apologists argue that even waterboarding does not necessarily constitute torture and that other coercive — and excruciatingly painful — interrogation methods, such as putting subjects in “stress positions” or exposing them to extreme temperatures, certainly do not. The task force strongly disagreed, citing U.S. laws and court rulings, international treaties and common decency.

The Senate intelligence committee has produced, but refuses to make public, a 6,000-page report on the CIA’s use of torture and the network of clandestine “black site” prisons the agency established under Bush. One of President Obama’s worst decisions upon taking office in 2009, in my view, was to decline to convene some kind of blue-ribbon “truth commission” to bring all the abuses to light.

It may be years before all the facts are known. But the decision to commit torture looks ever more shameful with the passage of time.

Bush’s decision to invade and conquer Iraq also looks, in hindsight, like an even bigger strategic error. Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction still have yet to be found; nearly 5,000 Americans and untold Iraqis sacrificed their lives to eliminate a threat that did not exist.

We knew this, of course, when Obama became president. It’s one of the main reasons he was elected. We knew, too, that Bush’s decision to turn to Iraq diverted focus and resources from Afghanistan. But I don’t think anyone fully grasped that giving the Taliban a long, healing respite would eventually make Afghanistan this country’s longest or second-longest war, depending on what date you choose as the beginning of hostilities in Vietnam.

And it’s clear that the Bush administration did not foresee how the Iraq experience would constrain future presidents in their use of military force. Syria is a good example. Like Saddam, Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless dictator who does not hesitate to massacre his own people. But unlike Saddam, Assad does have weapons of mass destruction. And unlike Saddam, Assad has alliances with the terrorist group Hezbollah and the nuclear-mad mullahs in Iran.

I do not advocate U.S. intervention in Syria, because I fear we might make things worse rather than better. But I wonder how I might feel — and what options Obama might have — if we had not squandered so much blood and treasure in Iraq.

Bush didn’t pay for his wars. The bills he racked up for military adventures, prescription-drug benefits, the bank bailout and other impulse purchases helped create the fiscal and financial crises he bequeathed to Obama. His profligacy also robbed the Republican Party establishment of small-government credibility, thus helping give birth to the tea party movement. Thanks a lot for that.

As I’ve written before, Bush did an enormous amount of good by making it possible for AIDS sufferers in Africa to receive antiretroviral drug therapy. This literally saved millions of lives and should weigh heavily on one side of the scale when we assess The Decider’s presidency. But the pile on the other side just keeps getting bigger.

In the previous post, I forgot to mention torture, as part of his legacy.

[WestCoastJoe]

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For GOP, opposition shouldn’t only mean obstruction

By Michael Gerson,

Published: April 29

Since Franklin Roosevelt busted the curve, presidents have generally tried to avoid the 100-day measure of their effectiveness. But as President Obama’s second term reaches this milestone, his legislative yield is particularly paltry.

Obama overplayed his hand on sequestration, with dire warnings that were roundly ignored. Then he poured his limited reserves of passion into a modest gun control measure that failed. Immigration reform remains a possibility only because of Obama’s irrelevance to the process. Any sign of excessive presidential enthusiasm would cause even pro-reform conservatives to bolt. And a grand budget bargain involving serious entitlement and tax reform remains unlikely at best. Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, recently conceded: “I can’t tell you what the specific path is at this moment.”

Obama has turned in desperation to the culinary arts — a series of White House dinners with legislators. Yet no amount of tiramisu is likely to break the logjam. More practically minded Democrats are hoping for decisive gains in the 2014 midterm elections. But a weak economy and middling presidential approval ratings are set against them. And Obamacare seems more of an electoral drag as it moves closer to full implementation. “The law’s basic method,” Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru remind us, “is to transform insurance into a product that few would voluntarily buy and then force everyone to buy it.”

Some conservative Republicans — convinced that the only duty of an opposition party is to oppose — seem pleased with this turn of events. They would urge their party to finish the job by killing immigration reform and halting budget negotiations.

This approach lacks only one element: an actual strategy. Defeating Obama is no longer a sufficient Republican goal. What Mitt Romney couldn’t manage is eventually accomplished by the 22nd Amendment. Instead, Republicans face a series of complicated political tasks.

First, they must manage to get back to George W. Bush’s level of support among Latinos — somewhere in the low- to mid-40s — and eventually compete for a majority of that vote. The alternative is political irrelevance at the national level. Sen. Marco Rubio’s immigration-reform effort is not sufficient to get Republicans to their goal. But if Republicans sabotage this effort, they will be discredited. The embrace of reform would earn Republicans a hearing. Given the current 13-year path to citizenship in the bill, the GOP would then have three presidential cycles to reposition itself as the party of immigrant aspiration.

Second, Republicans must manage the difficult task of becoming more socially inclusive without becoming socially liberal. Much of the party’s base is in a pew on a Sunday morning, and this isn’t going to change. But there is no reward in being the aggressors in the culture war. Any coalition that includes the young will need to accommodate diverse opinions on gay rights. And a truly pro-life party will also be committed to the rights and dignity of the poor and vulnerable. Moral conservatives gain credibility through consistency.

Third, Republicans must manage to stand for long-term fiscal sanity while promoting social and economic mobility. There is no economic value or political appeal in austerity for its own sake. One reason the health entitlement crisis is so dangerous is that it progressively squeezes domestic discretionary spending. Republicans need to accompany proposals for structural entitlement reform with creative measures to encourage education, job training and entrepreneurship.

All of these Republican goals demand a response more sophisticated than simple obstruction. For the GOP, politics is not a zero-sum game — and I don’t mean this in a good way. It is entirely possible for Obama to lose on a variety of issues and for Republicans to lose as well, in ways that make future victories less likely. Supporting a perfectly constitutional expansion of gun background checks might have been an opportunity for Republicans to display some rationality in public, even if it marginally aided a lame-duck president. Undermining immigration reform would be a terrible miscalculation, even if Obama is hurt.

At the end of eight years, Americans will probably be tired of Obama and perhaps of liberalism. The GOP will get another look. It would be a final victory for the president if Republicans focused on defeating him rather than on deserving victory.