The Bush Legacy

The end of a decade is a good time to look back and try to put the events of the last ten years into some kind of context. It's a time for top ten lists of the most important events of the decade, the teams of the decade, the music videos of the decade (for the 2 or 3 people who still watch music videos on MTV7 or wherever you can find them now). Frankly, I'm a little disappointed so far. The E! channel should be counting down the 25 most embarrassing celebrity moments. Some network should be telling us about reality TV's 20 most obvious signs of the coming apocalypse. ESPN should be engrossed in an orgy of all-decade teams by now. I demand pointless nostalgia and unfair comparisons. How will I know what was important to me this decade without someone on TV telling me?

Luckily, as always, I'm here to help. I don't think it's a stretch to call George W. Bush the most influential politician of this decade. He was the President for 8 of the 10 years and, for better or worse, his administration shaped American foreign policy for decades to come. I made a quick comment about the Bush legacy earlier this year, and now's as good a time as any to explore that a little more.

First, let me say that I voted for President Bush twice. And, for all the mistakes and questionable policies that followed, I'm still not sure you could convince me that I had a better option in either election. It isn't my intention to defend the Bush administration or to kick dirt on a guy who, for the most part, has left the stage pretty gracefully now that his time is up. I just want to take a closer look at a few points and try to figure out how we'll remember the 43rd President in 20 or 30 years.

About a month or two ago, I commented that the real Bush legacy was actually somewhat decent ideas executed incredibly poorly. I was talking about no child left behind, and I haven't changed my opinion. If you sat down during the 2000 election and made a top 5 list of important things you wanted to see the next President tackle, you would have had to put public education on the list. President Bush set out to be the education President, and he could have been. I don't have to lay out a whole case about how President Bush never got the job done on education. All I have to tell you is, if you made the same top 5 list today, a decade later, you'd still have to put public education on the list.

I have a theory about Presidents. I think, each President, if he or she really tries hard, can be transformative for the country on one major issue. Over time, if every consecutive President pulls his or her weight, we get most of our big problems solved. President Obama has chosen health care (at this point, I think the guy from Indiana Jones would say he's chosen unwisely and then watch the President's face melt away). President Bush had his chance at education, and he couldn't get it done. I'm not saying all the bad public education from here on out is his fault, but we may have missed our window.

I'd say this is too bad. For a President to go down in history as the guy who saved public education, when we know how important education is to a country, that would have been a pretty good legacy. Instead, our students are still losing the race in math and science and our country is in danger of losing the race for discovery, for innovation. It's a missed opportunity, nothing more, nothing less.

One of the most interesting pieces of the Bush legacy is Africa. President Bush's record on aid to Africa, and specifically helping to fight AIDS in Africa, is incredibly good. If you're reading this, and you're a real Bush hater who doesn't know anything about his record on Africa, take some time to look into it. It will be jarring, you'll feel like Neo when he found out about the matrix. It's such an outlier compared to the rest of his foreign policy reputation. There are two things I find especially interesting about this.

First, I find it interesting how little this gets mentioned by the media. I'm not one of these liberal media conspiracy theorists, but if George W. Bush had spent his eight years not helping Africa, but instead trying to screw different African nations out of oil or diamonds or something, Keith Olbermann would still be doing a nightly segment about it. It's a little disappointing.

I also find it interesting how little the Republican party talks about this. It's as if they decided that helping Africa wouldn't play well with their base, so they'd just sort of keep quiet about it. I find this especially odd since Barack Obama got something like 113% of the African-American vote in the last election. I wonder if any Republican strategist even tried suggesting that maybe some African-American voters would be interested to find out about the last Republican President's excellent record on Africa.

Obviously, the big deal for the Bush administration is the two wars. It should also be obvious that this is where the poor execution most disastrously hammered the Bush administration. So, let's talk a little about war, specifically Iraq. Why not Afghanistan? We all know the story there. We got attacked, we identified a country that provided a safe haven and support to the group that attacked us, so off to Afghanistan the troops went. Support for this war was pretty broad, it started off pretty well, then we decided to invade some other country and, well, like I said, we know the story. So, on to Iraq.

(Before I get into this, quick war sidenote. I recently saw a facebook group that was titled something like "soldiers aren't heroes." The premise seems to be that just because someone wears a uniform, it doesn't automatically make them a hero. OK, fine. But, in a country with a volunteer army, at a time when anyone who volunteers can be absolutely sure about being sent to a country where things unexpectedly explode on a regular basis, isn't it at least a little heroic to walk into a recruiting office and raise your hand? Really? Not even a little? I only mention this because, when I hear people say they hate the war but support the troops, I think about how Vietnam Vets were treated when they came back and I think, "holy crap! we learned something." Let's keep it that way.)

Poor execution example number one: Lying about why we needed to invade Iraq. Don't start with me about this conservatives, we were told Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they didn't. You can call it whatever you want, but those of us living in reality call that a lie. This is poor execution because I feel like I would have supported the Iraq war if I had been told the truth about it. I can't say for sure, because we don't know the whole truth, but if we had been told that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, who oppressed his people and hated us, who would harbor anti-American terrorists and develop weapons of mass destruction if given the opportunity, wouldn't that at least have been a case worth considering? Yes, it's not a slam dunk, still pretty hypothetical, but still somewhat compelling, and also true, which people generally like.

Poor execution example number two: Exit strategy. I don't think it would have been easy to develop a workable exit strategy. We were overthrowing a government, there's not a three month exit strategy you can just tack on to the end of that. Maybe there was no exit strategy once we decided to go in. Still, sometimes I wonder if the administration started believing their own story about being greeted as liberators. Cheney and Rumsfeld and those guys seemed honestly surprised sometimes by the difficulty of the post-invasion period. That's a pretty disastrous miscalculation.

Poor execution example number three: This is the one that always baffled me. Why didn't the Bush administration draw a clear line between the invasion and the re-building effort? Why not say the war was over after the successful invasion and characterize everything else as nation building or peace keeping or whatever? Wouldn't this have played better domestically and abroad? Wouldn't it also have been at least somewhat true? Maybe they felt like people wouldn't buy it. Maybe they felt like it needed to keep being a war to fit into the whole war on terror thing. I don't know, but I'm still a little confused by this.

Bottom line, I think the former President honestly believed Iraq was going to be a serious threat one day. I think, right or wrong, he did what he honestly thought was best for the safety of Americans. I don't think you get points for effort when you're the President, so if he was wrong, he was wrong. I also think it's shocking how badly he and his very experienced cabinet and advisers handled both wars. Lots of people probably expected policies they didn't agree with out of this administration, and maybe even some bad guy stuff, but I don't think a lot of us expected gross incompetence. That was a curveball.

Then there was hurricane Katrina. The botched federal response and the President's perceived indifference to this disaster were really what rendered him politically irrelevant for the rest of his second term. I think this was so surprising for everyone because President Bush had a history of really good instincts when it came to reacting to disaster.

Think about the days and months after September 11, 2001. A few days after, the President made remarks at ground zero, most famously including telling us that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." What a great moment. It didn't make anyone safer, but I think it was the first time since the attacks that a lot of us felt like we could feel safe again one day. A couple of months later, President Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. No one would have blamed him for shying away, not going out into the middle of a big crowd like that. But he did, he ran out in an FDNY jacket and threw a strike from the mound. People talk a lot about how the terrorist attacks gave President Bush a mandate for action, how we all got behind him because we were scared. But they forget how he rose to the moment, how he gave us someone to get behind.

This is why hurricane Katrina was so jarring for everyone. The way the President seemed so disengaged, so unfamiliar with what was happening, so barely interested. The best theory I have is that a hurricane wasn't terrorism, and after four years of worrying about nothing but terrorism, the President couldn't remember how to get up for something else. I don't know, but this effectively ended the Bush presidency, and with it, any chance the Republican party had of holding onto power.

Some quick hits on things I don't have full paragraphs for:

The patriot act: Ben Franklin suggested that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither, so there's that. (some people will argue that Franklin actually said "essential liberty". So? Isn't it all essential liberty?)
The economic collapse and subsequent bank bailout: President Bush isn't blameless for this, but he's also no more to blame than anyone else in the federal government, they all get an equal piece of that mess.
The 2000 recount: Jim Baker and the Bush people outsmarted the Gore campaign and the Supreme Court. Maybe they didn't play fair, but there's a lot to be said for winning.
Fiscal Responsibility: This one makes me crazy. There are like four things left that I still agree with the Republicans on, one of them is not spending the country into oblivion whenever it can be helped. Six years of controlling the White House and Congress and all we got was this lousy exploded deficit.
The Constitution: From Dick Cheney's assault on separation of powers to ignoring certain amendments when they were inconvenient (1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, for example), the Bush administration's record on the Constitution can best be described as atrocious.
Medicare Part D: Honestly, I don't know much about this, but from the little I do know, it seems he was trying to make medicine cheaper for people, so that's mostly good.

So, what's the Bush legacy? I don't know, that's for everyone to decide on their own. My take? I think George W. Bush was a President with clear leadership skills and a great deal of potential whose better angels were too often shouted down by his demons (be they metaphorical or Vice Presidential). I think hardly anything is ever as good or as bad as we remember it being. I think the two wars are a spare that Barack Obama or some future President has to pick up for Mr. Bush. I always thought it was a cop out when the Bush people would say they'll let history be the judge, but maybe they were right. There's a lot of history to be written before we close the book on George W. Bush.