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.

Legacy 3

Less than a month to go and although Bush has retreated to the Crawford Ranch, where he said he wanted to spend his days after the Presidency in the country away from Washington, DC and cities in general burnishing his image as a non-effete American, except that he is actually moving to Dallas where he has just purchased a new residence, the litany of disaster continues. Monday’s Washington Post detailed how political appointees in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) continually overrode staff scientists conclusions and changed the focus of the agency from protecting the public to favoring business interests. Following are excerpts from the Post article:

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at OSHA sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency's strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees "shut us out," a longtime senior career official said.

Among the regulations proposed by OSHA's staff but scuttled by political appointees was one meant to protect health workers from tuberculosis. Although OSHA concluded in 1997 that the regulation could avert as many as 32,700 infections and 190 deaths annually and save $115 million, it was blocked by opposition from large hospitals.

In the summer, the agency decided against moving further toward the regulation of crystalline silica, the tiny fibrous material in cement and stone dust that causes lung disease or cancer. OSHA promised a scientific peer review of the health risks by early 2005 and then by early 2007, but it never acted. Regulating silica exposures would have prevented an estimated 41 silicosis deaths and 20 to 40 lung cancers annually, according to OSHA.

In the spring, political appointees quietly scrapped work on another long-pending regulation of hazardous exposure to ionizing radiation in mailrooms, food warehouses, and hospitals and airports. It cited "resource constraints and other priorities" -- the same reason officials gave for withdrawing more than a dozen regulatory proposals in 2001.

Former OSHA director Edwin G. Foulke Jr. and other Bush appointees dispute the criticisms and say the agency carefully directed its scarce resources at the most dangerous workplaces, notably levying heavy fines after major workplace disasters. Foulke also expressed pride that a drop in reported workplace injuries that began in 1974 continued unabated under Bush and said that "we've done, I think, a really good job of moving things along" in rulemakings that proved to be more complex and time-consuming than he had anticipated.

Labor advocates, academic scholars and some OSHA officials have said that the decline in reported injuries is partly the result of a 14 percent drop in U.S. production and manufacturing jobs since 2001 and a 2002 change in the government's record-keeping rules.

The agency's first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA's real customers, not the nation's workers. "Everybody was pretty amazed," one of those present recalled. "Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently."

Within two years, Henshaw, an industrial hygienist who had worked for Monsanto and another chemical firm, withdrew 26 draft regulations on OSHA's public calendar, including rules meant to limit workplace exposure to air contaminants, highly hazardous chemicals, and shipyard and scaffolding hazards.

In many cases, the agency cited "resource constraints" as the reason. But Charles Gordon, a Labor Department lawyer who worked on OSHA regulations in the solicitor's office from 1975 until January, said that "all the work had been done" on many of the rules, including laborious, peer-reviewed risk assessments and economic analyses.

Henshaw, acting in concert with legislation passed by the Republican majority in Congress, quickly withdrew a proposed regulation -- drawn up during the Clinton administration -- meant to curtail ergonomic problems, which OSHA studies have said cause 60 percent of workplace injuries. He promised, instead, to issue nonmandatory guidelines and to cite violations under a general OSHA statute promoting safety.

But Richard Soltan, who retired from OSHA in 2006 after seven years as the Philadelphia regional administrator and 11 years as a deputy administrator, called Henshaw's promise "a sham." "I don't think we prosecuted two cases," Soltan said. "It was window dressing."

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. "We'll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened," said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter.

In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place "performance metrics" not previously used at OSHA.

Foulke said his senior staff appeared "pretty enthusiastic," but he acknowledged that there were grounds for tension with others. Leadership, he said, is "taking people down a path they don't want to go, until you get them to a place where they realize this is where they need to be."

Legacy 2

Compared to the Republicans, the Democrats, I think they are hawks. I know Obama's appointees. And I know their policy towards Sudan. Everybody here knows it. The policy is very aggressive and very harsh. I think we really will miss the judgments of George W. Bush.

Not everyone has given up on President Bush and his administration. He still has at least one friend on the international scene. The above quotation comes from Ghazi Suleiman, a human rights lawyer and member of the Southern People's Liberation Movement, which has a fragile power-sharing agreement with the ruling party of Sudan. He was prompted to say this based on the coming prospect of Obama and his administration’s foreign appointees all on record deploring Sudan’s leaders, who now fear they may be held to account for their part in the Darfur genocide.

Legacy

Having learned nothing in eight years, but insistent on rewarding those who put them in power, the Bush Administration is going out on a low note. Ignoring their rejection in the election, their last planned act is the revision of regulations or the enactment of new ones characterized by the potential environmental harm to the public and the obeisance to business desires. If they get these done in time, the Obama administration will only be able to change them after going through a laborious period of public review during which the deleterious effects of these changes will be adversely felt by the public.

As reported in the October 31, 2008 Washington Post:

The White House is working to enact over 90 federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

And from the December 2, 2008 NY Times:

The White House approved a final rule that will make it easier for coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys.

Edward C. Hopkins, a policy analyst at the Sierra Club, said: “The E.P.A.’s own scientists have concluded that dumping mining waste into streams devastates downstream water quality. By signing off on this rule, the agency has abdicated its responsibility.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is trying to finish work on a rule that would make it easier for utilities to put coal-fired generating stations near national parks. It is working on another rule that would allow utility companies to modify coal-fired power plants and increase their emissions without installing new pollution-control equipment.

Generation O

Obama is off and running so it is time to start the new blog. But Bush League will remain until at least Noon on January 20, 2009.

Click on above title to get to the blog or use the link to the right.

Elation

Not since John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, the first Presidential election I was able to vote in, has the result generated so much elation, possibility, energy, and hope. Just like then, the Obama candidacy introduces the possibility of change for the better championed by a young energetic representative of a new generation. I can vividly imagine the deep depression I would be feeling had McCain and Palin won and the reaction in the country from blasé acceptance to anger at the outcome.

Once Obama hit 200 electoral votes and we knew that the 77 votes from California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii were a given, it was time to celebrate. The Bradley effect was obliterated and the fear of a racial backlash gone. People were dancing in the streets and are still smiling days later.

Not that the country doesn’t remain divided, but a significant milestone has been passed and equal opportunity is no longer just a phrase that the powerful use to cover up reality. The Republicans are now left with old white voters, southern conservatives, and the farm states in the middle of the country. This decreasing demographic has run into a wall of African American and Latino minorities, and educated urban and suburban whites. Obama won each of the 19 states with the highest percent of voters who have an advanced degree.

There are still a lot of red states on the map, even with the electoral landslide, but a better way of looking at what happened is the map published in the NY Times. Just click on the title of this post and go to the third map entry. It shows each county in the US colored blue if the county's vote total was more Democratic than in 2004 and colored red if the county voted more Republican than in 2004. Looking at it this way it is nothing but blue skies.

In one day, this election reversed eight years of diminishing respect for the US throughout the world. It changed the anti-American feelings that Bush has generated and amazed people abroad who thought the US could never reject its racial past. Obama has become the source of hope for millions of people, no doubt an impossible position to be in (a young barber in Kenya was quoted as thinking that now he would get enough money to open his own barber shop) and compared to the cynicism that has characterized politics, this is a boon.

John McCain resurrected some of his lost dignity by making a gracious concession speech. Had he conducted his campaign with the demeanor he displayed during the speech (and of course if he hadn’t capitulated to the Republican base by emulating Bush’s policies, picking Palin, and running a negative campaign), he might have been elected.

McCain referenced the special significance of this election to African-Americans. Exemplifying this was a cartoon by Bok in the Akron Beacon Journal of a young African-American boy holding a basketball telling his parents that he did not think a career in the NBA was realistic so instead he was going to be President.

Not only were African-Americans thrilled at the outcome, so were many, many people, regardless of color. This election was exhilarating as it showed the progress the country has achieved, and it resonated for those interested in justice, especially those who lived through the civil rights era in the sixties.

Too many people voted against Obama just because he wasn’t white. But they will now see what they have been able to avoid seeing in the past – a smart and accomplished leader, who happens to be black, and who will, therefore, make the presence of someone of a different color meaningless as long as that person is capable and competent.

Even George Bush seems to be caught up in the wave of good feeling that has been generated. He is making a significant effort to bring about a transition to the Obama administration given the high stakes of not doing this well.

The Republican leadership in Congress, though, is still at a loss to understand what just happened to them. Following the appointment of Rahm Emanuel to the position of Chief of Staff, they issued a press release condemning this as a partisan appointment: that reaction of course was as partisan as you can get. Emanuel is a tough politician who is willing to say what is on his mind, and will do so to the President as well as to anyone in ear shot. What he brings to the position is experience and knowledge of the White House, Congress, and the private sector and a deserved reputation for getting things done even if that means compromising his ideology. That is exactly what a President should want in that position. Obviously the Republican leadership realizes that and is critical because they would rather have an ineffective person in that job.

So as we contemplate a change in Washington, let us concentrate on some of the benefits of this election:

No more having to listen to George Bush stumble though his public utterances and read about how uninterested he is in ideas when he knows in his gut what is good for the country

No more having to see Cindy McCain attached to John’s side. (Would she have been there during Cabinet meetings and press conferences)?

No more Sarah Palin attacks intended to divide the American people.

No further far right appointments to judgeships.

And after January 20, 2009 the reversal of over 200 Bush executive orders that stymied scientific findings on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights, California greenhouse gas emissions, and food and drug regulations.

No wonder so many people are smiling.


N.B. In reply to Anonymous’s comment on the last post, I would like to congratulate the writer for discerning that I was pleased with the outcome of the election. I would also like to make clear, however, that as long as George Bush remains President, Bush League will remain vigilant.

But the blessed day is coming and a blog named Bush League will no longer make much sense. So I think a new blog with a new name will be required. Stay tuned, but Generation O sounds like it might work.