He was the best of Presidents, he was the worst of Presidents

As we approach the inauguration and the end of the Bush presidency, the liberal mainstream media are stumbling over themselves trying to define President Bush as the “worst President in history”. Listening to NPR, you can just tell that the reporters are giddy with the prospect of Bush leaving and Obama coming in. The Left is flush with victory and the power brokers in the American left have a dream set-up. They have an overwhelmingly liberal congress, a disheartened and discredited American conservatism and an incoming President who, although politically shrewd, is clearly in way over his head. Make no mistake that while Obama will be in the White House, the real power brokers are the Congressional leaders.

Is President Bush “the worst President in American history”? Hardly. Has he been disappointing in many ways, even to conservatives? Yes. Did he make mistakes of action and inaction, and become virtually irrelevant and ineffectual late in his eight years as President? Absolutely! Is he the worst President ever? Not by a long shot. In fact, he isn’t going to be even the worst living ex-President. Mr. Carter wins that one hands down. Despite the image makeover of Jimmy Carter and the kindness of years away from the White House, you cannot forget what a horrible President he was. I was very young when he was President and I remember all too well what a trainwreck he was. That is reflective in a funny way in the pictures of all of the living Presidents and former Presidents in the Oval Office a week or so ago. Much was made of the painfully obvious distance between Clinton, Obama, Bush I and Bush II and the outcast Jimmy Carter. Not sure if it was intentional or not, but it spoke volumes of what a terrible President Jimmy Carter was.

When Ronald Reagan hammered Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, look where America was. We were in a deep economic malaise. We were a paper tiger in the world. The Soviets bullied us, our military was still stinging from the political defeat of Vietnam and in the greatest stain on American sovereignty a number of our citizens were being held hostage by terrorist thugs in Tehran. The sight of American citizens being paraded around as hostages with blindfolds on was one of the most shameful moments in American modern history, right up there with Americans fleeing Vietnam and dead soldiers being paraded around the streets of Mogadishu. After 444 days of the hostages being held in Tehran, in one of the most stinging rebukes ever given, the American hostages were released within minutes of Ronald Reagan taking office. The message was clear. Jimmy Carter was ineffective in getting the hostages released, was unwilling to do anything militarily about it and the botched rescue attempt frightened him into inaction.

The hostage crisis was the most visible of the Carter failures but the economy was in terrible shape as well. It was tough to borrow money at double digit interest rates. The economy was in the tank. There were gas lines in California. Right or wrong (I would say largely “right”!), the American people blamed Carter. Things were bad, he was negative about it and utterly lacking in basic leadership. I wouldn’t trust Jimmy Carter to lead me through the front door of my house, much less lead our nation.

Carter lost to Reagan by almost 10% of the popular vote. He only carried six states and the District of Columbia, losing 489 to 49 in the electoral college. Granted, compared to Walter Mondale’s debacle in 1984 where he carried one state and the District, losing by over 18% of the popular vote and losing 525-13 in the electoral college, it wasn’t that bad but when you look the alleged mandate of Barack Obama who beat McCain by 7% in the popular vote and 365-173 in the electoral college it is obvious that Carter was rejected and tossed out of office by the American people.

What is also forgotten is that while President Bush is at, we are constantly reminded, “historically low” approval ratings, the Democratically controlled Congress gets even lower marks, with an approval rating of around 9%. People are scared and unhappy, and they are reflecting that upon those who are governing them. President Bush gets the attention because he is the President which also explains his approval ratings of over 90% following September 11th. People are mad at government and Bush is the easy target. It is hard to be mad at Representative So-and-so from Podunk, Missouri unless you are in that district, but it is easy to aim your ire at President Bush and the media is more than happy to help encourage and channel that anger. When times are good, the President gets the accolades and cheers. When times are bad, he gets boos and low approval ratings.

So here is my retrospective on the Bush presidency.

The Bush presidency is really divided into two parts. The first part is made up of the weeks and months after September 11th. I would say that this first part ended with the now infamous speech on the warship returning home from the Persian Gulf with the “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was really at that point that opinion seemed to start turning against Bush, with the aid and abetting of the mainstream media beating the drum of defeat and failure, with their macabre running tally of U.S. military deaths reported as they happened.

First the errors of the Bush presidency.

Iraq

Iraq was perhaps the right war at the wrong time. Removing Saddam Hussein was a worthwhile mission. The world is a better place without him and his murderous sons raping and pillaging (literally) the Iraqi people. No sane person has any doubt that Hussein had at one time chemical weapons, proven by the bodies of Kurds in Northern Iraq and the use of those same weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. No sane person thinks that Hussein was not trying his hardest to obtain or develop nuclear weapons. The U.N. had weapons inspectors in Iraq for years to keep him from developing nukes, they weren’t in Baghdad on vacation. (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein’s successor in the crazy Islamic dictator chair is doing the exact same thing and is a lot closer to success.) The war was prosecuted properly, with swift military victory. The war itself is not the problem. The problem came before and after the war. We waited way too long to go in, giving Hussein time to move any evidence of a weapons program out of the country. I assume he thought by hiding his program he could ride out the invasion and go back to developing nukes later. I don’t think he saw his death at the end of a rope being his ultimate destiny. Afterward it became apparent that we had not thought out the rebuilding process as well as we should have, and years of stumbling, roadside bombs and virtual outright civil war followed. Liberating Iraq is not like liberating France from the Nazis. They had no idea how to run a democracy and are just now figuring it out. The liberation of Iraq will be the defining event of the Bush presidency and you can bet it will be spun negatively until Iraq is standing as a free, democratic state on her own someday in the future.

Hurricane Katrina

At the start, let me say that philosophically I don’t think it is the Federal government’s job to run to every natural disaster and fix things. Also, like many of the ills of the Bush administration, this fiasco was partly the fault of the Democrats (i.e. the lovely mayor of New Orleans and others who made it hard to get anything done) and also a media circus. But Bush looked tentative and uncaring during Katrina, and his lack of decisiveness made it seem like something should have been done but wasn’t. Katrina left a black eye on the Bush presidency that he never fully dealt with.

The handling of the economic crisis

Again perception is everything. The perception is that Bush waited too long and the whole collapse was his fault. Much of the fault lies on his desk, but much of it also is systemic (see my post here: Death by Savings) Our economy is a shell game of credit and consumption, and all of that finally came to a head. September 11th is completely forgotten by many Americans who are more worried about their job. Ironically, because the Bush policies have worked so well in keeping us safe, Americans are back to being self-centered about their pocketbooks.

The abandonment of fiscal restraint

This is my biggest gripe. I would say that the GOP with the blessing of Bush has been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors. Too much was spent, too little was gained. Had we spent money on oil exploration or nuclear power plants, that at least would have been useful. Instead money was poured down a sinkhole. I have no idea where it all went.

President Bush has a high opinion of his fellow man, and that trust in people has been his downfall.

President Bush was played for a patsy by the Democrats on a number of occasions, and he let it happen because I think he inherently has a high opinion and trust for people. I think he needs to get away from the Methodist church he has been a member of and start going to a solid Calvinist church where he will learn about Total Depravity (Voddie Baucham’s church is in Texas I believe…)

But not all went wrong. Here are the things that went right.

Iraq

Iraq is the great contradiction of the Bush administration. On the one hand, for a long time it seemed like an abject failure. But today we see relative calm in Iraq. The government is still hardly stable and will need U.S. support politically, economically and militarily for some time to come. But overall the Iraqi people are far freer than they were under Hussein. There are some who think they were better off under a ruthless dictators, but those same sort of people point out that Hitler made the trains run on time. Someday Iraq will be a stand alone democracy, and people like the crazy guy who threw his shoes at Bush can thank him for liberating their country at the cost of his own political legacy.

Two great Supreme Court Justices in Alito and Roberts.

Those two jurists have proven to be a solidly conservative as advertised. It is too bad Bush didn’t get to replace one of the old line liberals so Roe v. Wade could be overturned. I expect now to see the old liberals retire so that Obama can replace them with someone younger and even more liberal. We were so very close….

Frequent tax cuts.

As President Bush pointed out last night, every American tax payer is paying less in Federal taxes than they were when he was in office. There needed to be deeper spending cuts to go along with the tax cuts (see above) but philosophically Bush was right on that lower taxes are both better for the economy in the long-term and the right thing to do.

Governance with conviction.

Like him or not, agree with his decisions or not, President Bush typically led based on his convictions. When public opinion turned, he rarely strayed from his path. Is that inflexible? Perhaps, but it is also principled and a stark contrast to his predecessor. Bill Clinton never met a Big Mac, intern or opinion poll that he didn’t like. To say that the eight years of Clinton were governance by opinion poll is not being unfair. Right or wrong, Clinton gave the people what they wanted and is remembered fondly for it. Bush often bucked his own party and is being punished for it.

Perhaps in the context of the Bush presidency, one success stands out more than this one: We have had no terrorist attacks on American soil in the more than seven years following September 11th. Those who say America is not safer today are head-in-the-sand liberals. Do you remember the weeks following September 11th? As a nation we were all expecting the next attack. But thanks in large part to the diligence of our armed forces, intelligence community and law enforcement we have not had a terrorist attack on America soil since September 11th. To have thought that would be the case, seven years with no terror attacks in America, on September 12th, 2001 would have been unthinkable. The Bush doctrine of taking the fight to the terrorists instead of trying to deal with the terrorists as common criminals has kept American civilians safe.

When President Bush was wrong, he was really wrong. When he was right, he was really right. Trying to reassure the American people that the economy was fundamentally sound when it was collapsing all around him made him look like “Baghdad Bob” during the liberation of Iraq. But when he stood on that rubble after September 11th and declared that those responsible would come to justice, when he gave his speech in the National Cathedral, there was no President like him. His presidency is one of great opportunity missed and great potential squandered. I, like many others, am disappointed but I think that an unbiased assessment of his Presidency in the future will be more kind than the media and liberal historians are today.