The Legacy of Bush 43
I’ve been reflecting on how history will judge President George W. Bush. This is a difficult topic. There are those who actually hate him, viscerally and with no sense of fairness or proportion. There are also those who like him and strongly support him, despite everything. I fall somewhere in the middle, and I suspect there are a lot of other people in the same place.
To begin, there was the election of 2000, which Democrats believe was stolen from them in Florida and by the Supreme Court. Anyone who has actually read the Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, along with the history of how it got to the Supreme Court, knows it wasn’t stolen. Those who go further and read the studies of what most likely would have happened if the decision had gone the other way know that Gore probably would have lost anyway. Sadly, facts like this don’t matter, at least not yet.
People who still support Bush unreservedly are equally blind. He did things that turned out badly, and he missed opportunities to do better. In particular, his management of federal taxing and spending was atrocious. You can’t tax like a Republican and spend like a Democrat and get away with it forever. The economic crisis of 2008 will also blemish his legacy for the short term, even though he didn’t do much to cause it and couldn’t have done much to prevent it.
The term “current history” is an oxymoron. The most significant source we now have on the presidency of Bush 43 is the media, which has been consistently biased against him. Their reporting for the past eight years has consisted not so much of outright lies, Dan Rather notwithstanding, but of a constant drumbeat of negative and misleading information. The media bears a heavy responsibility for turning Americans and foreigners alike against the President and the U.S. itself. Slipping along behind them, like street sweepers following the horses in a parade, have been ill-educated but fashionable Hollywood glitterati, liberal bloggers spewing spittle onto their monitors, and all the usual foreign and domestic America-haters.
I think objective historians in a decade or two will present a much more balanced and factual picture of President Bush and his administration. The reality of 2000 will be better understood; Katrina will be seen as a situation in which local and state governments failed badly, with the federal government doing better but not well; foreign assistance programs will be seen as strengthened and improved, with significantly greater support for the fight against AIDS; scandals such as those involving “torture,” electronic surveillance, WMDs, firing U.S. Attorneys, and so on will seem much less significant when put in perspective; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be acknowledged as qualified successes; and most important, President Bush will get credit for preventing a major attack on U.S. soil after 9/11.
To some extent, this is a natural process. History doesn’t work well with passions of the present swirling around it. Truman is seen in a much more better light than he was a half-century ago, and Eisenhower’s presidency is being re-evaluated as time goes on. Even Nixon is now being given more credit for his accomplishments. So it will be with George W. Bush.
I’m not trying to paint President Bush in glowing colors. I don’t think he was a particularly good president. But I think he was better than Gore would have been and significantly better than Kerry would have been. Time will tell–but I’m betting that the real history of this time, when finally written, will portray President Bush as a president who did a creditable job in a very difficult time.
(This article was also posted at Opinion Forum.)
LOL! =)
By the way, I hope you cleaned the spittle off your monitor before it dried.