Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Finally, after eight horrific years of the Bush administration, George is gone. Any twinge of feeling sympathy for a President with an abysmal approval rating, having to listen to Obama excoriate his performance in a nuanced, subtle way that Bush probably might be able to understand if he ever bothers to read the speech, should be immediately banished. He and Cheney deserve all the mortification they get and we can expect nothing from them but desperate attempts to justify their actions, which will be irritating and painful to be reminded of.

They have already begun claiming that they kept America safe since 9/11 by stopping Al Qaeda in its tracks, somehow overlooking the 4,200 American military deaths they effected in Iraq with our presence there making it a lot easier for al Qaeda than having to cross oceans to get to us.

I have been planning to try to summarize all the things that I have written about for the past six years but the Obama Inauguration’s hope, and promise are too positive to spend a lot of time excoriating the Bush philosophy. Once you get past Iraq, the environment, the dismissal of The Constitution and scientific knowledge, the bias toward business interests, the failing economy, and the Supreme Court appointments – all the things that have made this administration so depressing, I keep coming back to a critical Bush/Rove decision. After 9/11 and Afghanistan, a significant part of the country was behind George Bush. I even told friends I would vote for him if there were an election at that time.

But instead of building on that momentum and uniting the country, he and Rove decided it was better to appeal only to the Republican base and the rest of the country be dammed. Better to be elected with 50.1% of the vote than to win in a landslide. Winning with just the base meant not having to compromise. And that is what they did and in the process created Obama’s theme of governing the entire country rather than just your supporters and a stinging defeat for the Republican Party.

So instead of rehashing all the details that have kept me writing this blog, I’ll end it with a Maureen Dowd column in today’s NY Times, which nails the Bush character perfectly.

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.
As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”

Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”
Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)

W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.

W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.

Legacy 4

When asked about how the GOP could avoid the kind of losses it suffered in the 2008 election -- it lost the presidency and several seats in the House and Senate – [President Bush] said, "I think that we shouldn't change our philosophy." But he added: "We may want to change our message. . . .”

As a lesson learned from the past four years, the above is as far off as one can get, although to put a positive spin on it, you could say that he means lying to the public is not a good idea.

For example, the administration has continually put forth an optimistic, even rosy, economic outlook.

Throughout much of past year, even as the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve began preparing for the worst behind closed doors, Bush and his aides trumpeted the fundamental strength of the U.S. economy and dismissed Democratic proposals for a second stimulus package. A White House fact sheet released on Sept. 5 was titled: "American Economy Is Resilient in the Face of Challenges."

Based on an analysis of key data, economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades. The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

Even excluding the 2008 recession, however, Bush presided over a weak period for the U.S. economy. For example, for the first seven years of the Bush administration, gross domestic product grew at a paltry 2.1 percent annual rate.

The administration also failed to gain traction on some of the fundamental economic and fiscal issues facing the nation -- including solidifying the finances of Medicare and Social Security, simplifying the tax code, or making health care more affordable. Resolution of those issues might have left the government more flexibility to respond to the current crisis by lowering the nation's future budget deficits.

The federal government had a modest budget surplus when Bush took office in 2001, but ran a deficit -- funding itself to a significant degree with borrowed money -- of 4.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2004 and 4 percent in 2005, even as the economy was growing at a healthy pace.

All quotations are from the Washington Post, January 12, 2009.

Only eight days to go.