Looking Back on President George W. Bush's Troubled Presidency

December 8, 2008 RSS Feed Print

Comment (31)
Tweet

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Not for George W. Bush, the inveterate optimist who thought his presidency would somehow conclude on a high note despite his abysmal job-approval ratings and his unpopular policies. As recently as September, he told friends of his confidence that positive news out of Iraq, where a surge in U.S. troops had helped quell rampant violence, would soon dominate the headlines and give him a PR lift. Instead, the media today are focusing on the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession—and many are blaming him for the crisis.

Faced with these disappointments, Bush has gotten introspective in his final days, a tendency he resisted for eight years when he was known for strut and swagger. In the beginning, when Ari Fleischer, his first White House press secretary, would bring him queries from reporters asking how he felt about some news development, Bush would dismiss them as "goo-goo questions." Now Bush welcomes such detours as he tries to humanize himself and encourage the public, the media, and historians to give him more credit as they assess his legacy.

He finally admits that his low standing in the polls does bother him. "Everybody wants to be liked," the normally thick-skinned president told a December 1 forum on global health. He concedes that many voters backed Democrat Barack Obama on Election Day as a protest against the Bush years. He admits to frustration with his big setbacks, especially the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was one of his main reasons for going to war there. Similarly, he is disappointed by the failure of Congress to pass his measures to overhaul immigration and Social Security, and he is distressed by the soaring level of federal spending and the continuing partisan warfare in Washington. In a gesture of conciliation (which his Democratic critics say he withheld for most of his presidency), he has ordered his aides to be gracious and helpful to the new president and his staff, even though Obama was a merciless critic of Bush throughout the campaign.

At times, Bush has turned unusually personal, bordering on melancholy. "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process," Bush told his sister, Doro Bush Koch, in a recent interview for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. "I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values, and I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a president that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them."

Asked in the interview by his sister what he is most proud of, Bush said, "I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package; that came to Washington, D.C., with a set of political statements and worked as hard as I possibly could to do what I told the American people I would do." Aides say he is also proud of the tax cuts he pushed through Congress in his first term; his education-accountability program; and his appointment of Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Even though many of his individual objectives fizzled, Bush has still had a huge impact on the presidency as an institution through the expansion of executive prerogative. He believed, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, that presidential authority had eroded dangerously over the years as Congress asserted itself. One of his major legacies is "the idea that presidential power should be at the forefront and should be used aggressively and brazenly," says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. "That's not going to be rolled back anytime soon," adding, "We rarely see presidents relinquish power." Bush used "signing statements" to greatly expand his power and ignore the will of Congress as expressed in legislation, and he used executive orders and other unilateral actions on everything from authorizing harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists to changing environmental policy to allow more energy development. But it is on the fundamental question of war and peace that his legacy hinges.

Read about how the "war on terror" will shape Bush's legacy.

Read more about Bush and the war in Iraq.
Read more about Bush and the "war on terror."
Read more about Bush and the financial crisis.
Read more about Bush and Hurricane Katrina.
Read more about Cheney--Bush's Right-Hand Man.
View a photo gallery of Bush's presidency.
Read more by Kenneth T. Walsh.

Tags:: politics,; George W. Bush,; Bush administration

Reader Comments Read all comments (31)

Add Your Thoughts Comment Name State Email

Please enter the two words below into the text field underneath the image.

Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.

11. Bush squandered global goodwill after 9/11. Bush thumbed his nose at world sympathy for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, by declaring a global war on terrorism and declaring “you are either with us or against us.”
12. Bush turned to Iraq not Afghanistan. The Bush administration soon started beating war drums for an attack on Iraq, where there was no proven Al Qaeda link, instead of Afghanistan, where the 9/11 bombers had trained and Osama bin Laden was based. His 2002 State of the Union speech declared that Iraq was part of an “Axis of Evil.”
13. Bush attacked United Nation weapons inspectors. The march to war in Iraqstarted with White House attacks on the credibility of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, whose claims that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons proved to be true.
14. Bush flat-out lied about Iraq’s weapons. In a major speech in October 2002, he said that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to send unmanned aircraft to the U.S. with bombs that could range from chemical weapons to nuclear devices. “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” he said.
15. Bush ignored the U.N. and launched a war. The Bush administration tried to get the U.N. Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq, which it refused to do. Bush then decided to lead a "preemptive" attack regardless of international consequences. He did not wait for any congressional authorization to launch a war.
16. Bush abandoned international Criminal Court. Before invading Iraq, Bush told the U.N. that the U.S. was withdrawing from ratifying the International Criminal Court Treaty to protect American troops from persecution and to allow it to pursue preemptive war.
17. Colin Powell’s false evidence at U.N. The highly decorated soldier turned Secretary of State presented false evidence at the U.N. as the American mainstream media began its jingoistic drumbeat to launch a war of choice on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
18. Bush launched a war on CIA whistleblowers. When a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed saying there was no nuclear threat from Iraq, the White House retaliated by leaking the name and destroying the career of his wife, Valerie Plame, one of the CIA’s top national security experts.
19. Bush pardoned the Plame affair leaker. Before leaving office, Bush pardoned the vice president’s top staffer, Scooter Libby, for leaking Plame’s name to the press.
20. Bush launched the second Iraq War. In April 2003, the U.S. military invaded Iraq for the second time in two decades, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and more than a million refugees as a years of sectarian violence took hold on Iraq. Nearly 6,700 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
21. Baghdad looted except for oil ministry. The Pentagon failure to plan for a military occupation and transition to civilian rule was seen as Baghdad was looted while troops guarded the

Ajay Jain of TX 6:07PM May 10, 2013

11. Bush squandered global goodwill after 9/11. Bush thumbed his nose at world sympathy for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, by declaring a global war on terrorism and declaring “you are either with us or against us.”
12. Bush turned to Iraq not Afghanistan. The Bush administration soon started beating war drums for an attack on Iraq, where there was no proven Al Qaeda link, instead of Afghanistan, where the 9/11 bombers had trained and Osama bin Laden was based. His 2002 State of the Union speech declared that Iraq was part of an “Axis of Evil.”
13. Bush attacked United Nation weapons inspectors. The march to war in Iraqstarted with White House attacks on the credibility of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, whose claims that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons proved to be true.
14. Bush flat-out lied about Iraq’s weapons. In a major speech in October 2002, he said that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to send unmanned aircraft to the U.S. with bombs that could range from chemical weapons to nuclear devices. “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” he said.
15. Bush ignored the U.N. and launched a war. The Bush administration tried to get the U.N. Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq, which it refused to do. Bush then decided to lead a "preemptive" attack regardless of international consequences. He did not wait for any congressional authorization to launch a war.
16. Bush abandoned international Criminal Court. Before invading Iraq, Bush told the U.N. that the U.S. was withdrawing from ratifying the International Criminal Court Treaty to protect American troops from persecution and to allow it to pursue preemptive war.
17. Colin Powell’s false evidence at U.N. The highly decorated soldier turned Secretary of State presented false evidence at the U.N. as the American mainstream media began its jingoistic drumbeat to launch a war of choice on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
18. Bush launched a war on CIA whistleblowers. When a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed saying there was no nuclear threat from Iraq, the White House retaliated by leaking the name and destroying the career of his wife, Valerie Plame, one of the CIA’s top national security experts.
19. Bush pardoned the Plame affair leaker. Before leaving office, Bush pardoned the vice president’s top staffer, Scooter Libby, for leaking Plame’s name to the press.
20. Bush launched the second Iraq War. In April 2003, the U.S. military invaded Iraq for the second time in two decades, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and more than a million refugees as a years of sectarian violence took hold on Iraq. Nearly 6,700 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
21. Baghdad looted except for oil ministry. The Pentagon failure to plan for a military occupation and transition to civilian rule was seen as Baghdad was looted while troops guarded the

Ajay Jain of TX 6:06PM May 10, 2013

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/50-reasons-you-despised-george-w-bushs-presidency-reminder-day-his-presidential
50 Reasons We Despised George W. Bush's Presidency: A Reminder on the Day of His Presidential Library Dedication
1. Bush stole the presidency in 2000. People may forget that Republicans in Florida purged more than 50,000 African-American voters before Election Day, and then went to the Supreme Court where the GOP-appointed majority stopped a recount that would have awarded the presidency to Vice-President Al Gore if all votes were counted. National news organizations verified that outcome long after Bush had been sworn in.
2. Bush’s lies started in that race. Bush ran for office claiming he was a “uniter, not a divider.” Even though he received fewer popular votes than Gore, he quickly claimed he had the mandate from the American public to push his right-wing agenda.
3. Bush covered up his past. He was a party boy, the scion of a powerful political family who got away with being a deserter during the Vietnam War. He was reportedly AWOL for over a year from his assigned unit, the Texas Air National Guard, which other military outfits called the "Champagne Division.”
4. Bush loved the death penalty. As Texas governor from 1995-2000, he signed the most execution orders of any governor in U.S. history—152 people, including the mentally ill and women who were domestic abuse victims. He spared one man’s life, a serial killer.
5. Bush was a corporate shill from Day 1. Bush locked up the GOP nomination by raising more campaign money from corporate boardrooms than anyone at that time. He lunched with CEOs who would jet into Austin to "educate" him about their political wish lists.
6. Bush gutted global political progress. He pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol which set requirements for 38 nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, saying that abiding by the agreement would “harm our economy and hurt our workers.”
7. Bush embraced global isolationism. He withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, over Russia’s protest, taking the U.S. in a direction not seen since World War I.
8. Bush ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. He ignored the Aug. 6, 2001 White House intelligence briefing titled, “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” Meanwhile, his chief anti-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, and first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, testified in Congress that he was intent on invading Iraq within days of becoming president.
9. Bush ramped up war on drugs, not terrorists. The Bush administration had twice as many FBI agents assigned to the war on drugs than fighting terrorism before 9/11, and kept thousands in that role after the terror attacks.
10. “My Pet Goat.” He kept reading a picture book to grade-schoolers for seven minutes after his top aides told him that the World Trade Centers had been attacked in 9/11. Then Air Force One flew away from Washington, D.C., vanishing for hou

Ajay Jain of TX 6:03PM May 10, 2013

Looking Back on President George W. Bush's Troubled Presidency

Reader Comments Read all comments (31)

Rankings Lists

U.S. News & World Report

Sections

Looking Back on President George W. Bush's Troubled Presidency

More News

You might be interested in...

Reader Comments Read all comments (31)

Follow U.S. News

Like Us On Facebook

Latest Videos

Subscribe

Rankings Lists

U.S. News & World Report

Sections