Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their last president. Yes, it is reevaluate George W. Bush time! And the pundits are out with their “Bush weren’t so bad” articles. (Yes, that was a little grammar humor with the subjunctive.) As you can probably guess, I don’t think much about this rethinking. The truth is that I have major problems with the current president and he is almost unimaginably better than the last.
Of course, the big thing now is for conservatives to come out in favor of Bush. Jennifer Rubin told us earlier today that Bush Is Back. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that. Also today, Matt Yglesias tried to buff this iconoclast credentials with, Some Good Things George W. Bush Did. But sadly for Mr. Bush (but great for truth, justice, and the America way), he was not up to the task.
He mentions, as he said, some good things that Bush did. But they all come with negatives. Sure, Bush put more money into education; but he also enshrined our testing mania. He gave prescription drug coverage to seniors; but that was just a way to create one of the worst examples of corporate welfare ever. He created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; but he also limited sex education to abstinence only and spread disinformation about condoms. In the end, the best that Yglesias can say is, “Does this outweigh exceptional poor macroeconomic performance and well-known national security policy failures? Probably not.” That’s an understatement.
We’ve already read about Jeb Bush and others claiming that history will be kind to Bush. Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote an excellent article that destroys that claim, The Wrath of the Conquest of the Planet of the Bride of the Son of the Return of Cranky Blogging. He doesn’t look were most people have: at the disastrous outcomes of Bush’s policies. Instead, he looks at process and especially how disengaged Bush was. His conclusion:
And it isn’t like Bernstein is some radical. Earlier today, he wrote a mostly positive discussion of Max Baucus’ career. Regardless, I think Bernstein is correct. Bush’s improved polling numbers are just due to the fact that most people have forgotten how Bush governed. Historians will not be fooled by that. Time will only sharpen the historical lens on both his processes and his outcomes. What’s more, his partisan apologists will eventually die off and there will be no one to replace them. Bush will be remembered as a bad president, but I wouldn’t necessarily say the worst; there is so much competition for that.
We should keep in mind that just about every criticism in Bernstein’s conclusion could be leveled at Reagan, now more-or-less deified. These memory-hole mythmaking machines aren’t about the person or the job performance; they’re about the ideology. Making Reagan a hero was a way of claiming that everything he signed into law was ultimately good for the country (even though very little of it was) and I suspect that’s what’s going on with "W."
Incidentally, I generally don’t like Oliver Stone’s movies (too bombastic and obvious) but he make a pretty good one in "W", which was heavily lifted from Jacob Weisberg’ biography — George as a prisoner of living up to his rich family and failing miserably. It’s a rather sympathetic portrait, with a good performance by Brolin as W and another by Postlhewaite as H.W.
@JMF – I think Bush made a much bigger mess. I do agree however that Reagan’s rating will go down over time. We are only now (maybe) starting to get over the carnage that he brought on the country. I think over the next 50 years, historians will look at him for the failure he was. All he did economically was take the government into debt and transfer huge amounts of money from the poor to the rich. And other than on nuclear arms, he didn’t do anything good regarding foreign affairs. He gets a lot of create for things he had nothing to do with: fall of the USSR and "Morning in America."