Extending Daylight Savings Was Bush's Best Domestic Achievement

By Julia Piscitelli, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Through the darkness I have seen the light of the policies of George W. Bush.

Last Friday, my husband told me that he mowed the front lawn—his beloved obsession—after work. I also realized that I wore my sunglasses in the car on my commute home that day. How could that be on the last Friday of October? I remember how much I hated when I was a kid that by late fall, it would already be dark soon after I got home from school. But thanks to President George W. Bush signing into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005, he extended daylight savings time by four weeks.

Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated with the barrage of criticism from conservatives on the right about President Obama's accomplishments in his first nine months in office—heck, he's barely been in office longer than a full-term pregnancy and you'd swear he's getting blamed for the common cold.

Evidently the speedy passage of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act when America was at the lowest depths of a global recession was not enough for this audience. And with so many politicians not living up to their lofty campaign promises, President Obama and the Congress are now on the verge of passing sweeping healthcare reform that both the system and Americans desperately need.

So I thought, what can I say that would be kind about how I feel about the domestic successes of the Bush administration? The unfunded mandate of the No Child Left Behind Law? Not feeling it. His $700 trillion bailout of Wall Street? Maybe. But since the Obama administration did, after all, provide assistance to more than just a three-block section of lower Manhattan, Obama trumps on that one. Mission Accomplished? Decimating the surplus and turning it into record deficits? I had to stop and focus on the positive.

Sure, we all got to drive to work for the past few weeks in pitch-black darkness, but my husband got to mow the lawn after work. Saving his weekend sunlight hours for golf. This means extended light and extended domestic bliss for me. So this initiative gets my vote for the most significant domestic accomplishment of the Bush presidency.

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