Okay, hopefully this is the very last entry about President George Walker Bush. The man was undisputedly a disastrous President and if you asked me back in 2000, I would have (and probably did) told you so. Not for partisan reasons, but basically for humanist reasons. So before he sets off into the sunset I want to set something straight, because I found this article in the Economist this week.
Few people would have predicted this litany of disasters when Mr Bush ran for the presidency in 2000. True, the 2000 election was likely to be divisive because of the peculiar arithmetic of the outcome (Mr Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 500,000 votes, then won a disputed recount in Florida by a few hundred). But for most people Mr Bush was a pretty acceptable choice, and certainly not a crusader-in-waiting.
He came across as an affable chap, particularly when compared with his uptight rival. Frank Bruni, who covered his election campaign for the New York Times, wrote in 2002 that “the Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster.” And the then governor of Texas presented himself as a centrist—a new kind of “compassionate conservative”, a “uniter rather than a divider”, an advocate of a “humble” and restrained foreign policy. The Economist liked this mixture enough to endorse him in 2000.
Ya'know, I like the Economist magazine. As somebody who is not really trained as an economist, what the magazine provides is a concise, succinct, insight into how the economy is working from week to week, month to month. It's a little more than small-l liberal in its outlook, but I do like it for its rational tone. Reason, after all should lead us to enlightenment. All the same, the guys who write and edit the Economist are conservative types who one imagines went to very nice private schools.
It doesn't surprise me at all that the Economist endorsed Mr. Bush back in 2000. GWB was their guy because ostensibly, they didn't pick up just strident the undercurrent of his rhetoric was sounding. The smart boffins at the Economist allowed themselves to be persuaded that GWB was all right because he was for Free Trade and seemed affable enough. It's a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
GWB was no centrist. A Born Again Christian is not a centrist in any context. A man who gets up and says the Creationists have a right to teach Intelligent Design at schools is not a centrist. Here's some more from the article:
The fruit of all this can be seen in the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory. He was content to be president of half the country—a leader who fused his roles of head of state and leader of his party. He devoted his presidency to feeding the Republican coalition that elected him.
The most important legislation of his first year in office was a $1.35 trillion tax cut that handed an extra $53,000 to the top 1% of earners. At his farewell press conference on January 12th Mr Bush called his tax cuts the “right course of action”, as if they were an unpopular but heroic decision. They weren’t. The budget was in surplus in 2000, and both Mr Bush’s main Republican rival, John McCain, and his Democratic opponent, Mr Gore, also wanted to cut taxes, but by less, so as to pay down more debt and shore up Social Security (public pensions). Mr Bush’s much larger tax cut reflected his, and his party’s, belief that lower taxes restrain the size of government, empower individuals and are good for both growth and Republican prospects.
Mr Bush sold his first tax cut, in 2001, as recession insurance. He did the same in 2003; and though the budget surplus was gone by then, he upped the ante by also lowering taxes on capital gains and dividends. Lower taxes on capital boost investment, but, as one former senior administration official says, that thought was secondary: “It was a political winner that happened to coincide with good economics.” Lower taxes on capital had the potential to bolster a growing “investor class” that tended to vote Republican.
Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.
It's a little late calling those dolts homunculi now. Having lived through the idiotic, reactionary, self-lauding, self-satisfied, ideologically-motivated, morally-stunted, ethically-challenged double-speaking, double-dealing gobbledegook chicanery that was the Conservative decade of George W. Bush and John Howard, I would dearly like to tell these boffins at the Economist that sometimes you can judge a guy by his beliefs, and that is all you need to know in order to make that judgment call. The hyper-partisan, crusading, anti-intellectual President who appointed a pack of idiots to important positions was always on the cards given his beliefs.
It's not that I'm saying his religion is wrong or that religion is wrong. It's just that George W. Bush was one guy you knew who could never get above his religion, because he was a born again Christian. If the Economist is a little uncomfortable about how all this turned out, I hope they realise it's been torture fo those of us who knew exactly the kind of stupidity was likely to come out of having such a lazy mind in the Oval Office, going into it in 2000.
But you know, next week there'll be a new President in the White House, and there will be a new issue of the Economist and I'm bloody well likely to read that one too. The world keeps turning.
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