The legacy of George Walker Bush, America's 43rd President
I wanted to get this particular blog post out before I had a chance to see the election results from Tuesday (November 4th’s) polling. Not that it would have influenced what I had to say on the legacy of our 43rd President, George Walker Bush, I also wanted my audience to be certain that I hadn’t been unduly influenced by the election results. Yet exams and assignments disrupted my plan and it wasn’t till the 9th of November that I finally had an opportunity to sit down and compose this particular post on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop.
Some may question the timing: The new President-elect doesn’t take office till the 20th of January, 2009, over two months away from today during which President Bush could still manage to get some major accomplishments under his belt or commit blunders, depending on which one you think him naturally more pre-disposed to. And as the President likes to point out himself to the Press corps that historians are still examining George Washington’s record and writing books about him to this day. Indeed “His Excellency: George Washington” on the life and times of our first President was a best seller in very recent times. So one shouldn’t be surprised if in 2235 A.D. people are still critically looking at whether the Iraq War was conducted appropriately or not and whether George Bush should have fired Donald Rumsfeld earlier than when he did. Yet, looking at the barrage of criticism that President Bush has been subjected to, I have considered giving people somewhat of a more balanced and less vitriolic portrait of our current President than what one might get from the mainstream liberal media and certainly from what one might get from Bill Maher.
In standard McKinsey style which I am yet to quite give up, let me start with what I believe have been the achievements of his administration. To me the most important accomplishment of President Bush has been to prevent another terrorist strike on the U.S. since 9/11, a feat which is rarely acknowledged or even recognized. Many of the readers of my blog, probably like myself, hail from India, and if they still happen to frequent rediff.com or Indiatimes.com, then they would know that in the last 4 years of the Manmohan Singh administration, terrorist attacks have become a recurring activity and those, unlike in the past, have not just been confined to Kashmir. Indeed they have taken place across the length and breadth of the country with such impunity that Non-Resident Indians like us continue to be worried about the safety of our relatives back home in India. And to no small measure, that has directly resulted from withdrawal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) that had been introduced by the B.J.P.-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and passed in a special joint session of Parliament. No doubt the fundamental weakness of Manmohan Singh himself as a Prime Minister has played a part in exacerbating the problems, but the withdrawal of POTA and the inability of the present United Democratic Front government to tackle the issue head-on is also to blame.
And it is not just India where Islamic terrorists have continued to wreak havoc. Places across the world in Spain, U.K., Indonesia, not to mention, Israel have been subjected to repeated terrorist attacks since 9/11, yet we haven’t had one as yet (and hope we never do). In large measure, I would credit President Bush for having provided leadership on the issue and enabled us to be safe and secure, facilitated in large measure by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Some champions of personal liberty and freedom as well as some loonies from the left (these are two distinct groups, just to be clear, the first I can reason with, the second one I can’t) would clamor about how the NSA has tapped phones of ordinary Americans in the attempt to keep us safe. Leaving aside the relative merits of that highly-contested position, I am of the opinion that I would rather have my cell phone conversations with my family and friends tapped rather than be blown up into smithereens when I am buying groceries at Giant Eagle or renting a video at Blockbuster. For all the personal qualities of President Obama that he has shown (or his supporters have attributed to him even if he hasn’t displayed them), a trait which seems to be lacking in him is his inability to clearly see the threat of Islamic terrorism and recognize it as the menace it is. Indeed if you are not even willing to recognize the problem and refuse it to call it by what it is (as is the case in U.K. where Gordon Brown banned the use of the word “Muslim” in the context of terrorist attacks), the chances that you will be able to deal with it are slim. Heavens forbid, should we have a terrorist attack in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles a few months into an Obama administration and should that turn out to be the direct consequence of more curbs on what the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been permitted to do, the American public is less likely to be enamored with Barack and is more likely to finally acknowledge the contributions of President Bush.
Beyond his ability to curb terrorism, what else do I believe have been the other notable accomplishments of his administration? Well, something that I have been always thrilled about has been the nomination of two extremely committed and brilliant set of judges to the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. John Roberts is the kind of the super-star everyone would like to have on their team. Summa-cum-laude from Harvard Law School, he was a Partner at Hogan & Hartson, one of the most prestigious law firms in the capital at the age of 37!1 Samuel Alito has had an equally impressive resume having been schooled at the crème-de-la-crème of the nation, Princeton University and Yale Law School and having served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit prior to being nominated to the Supreme Court.2 The narrow conservative majority of 5-4 (and I am including Justice Kennedy in the cabal of five even though he has often defected to the other side) have enabled citizens of D.C. to enjoy their Second Amendment rights or parents in Seattle and Kentucky to successfully challenge school busing programs. I am less familiar personally with some of the justices that President Bush has appointed to the federal courts, yet if my memory serves me correctly, justices such as Janice Roger Browns, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor have also been nominated and subsequently confirmed by the Senate under his watch. All of these justices are committed to the principles on which our constitution was written and are not likely to engage in judicial activism of the kind displayed by the judges on the California State Supreme Court who have repeatedly tried to play God by legalizing gay marriage after the voters in that state have repeatedly voted to overturn it, including as recently as this past Tuesday.
Moving on to foreign policy, the failures of his administration have been more numerous than his accomplishments. Yet I believe the decision to engage more closely with India, the largest and most thriving multi-party democracy in the world (and my motherland!) and get the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act passed will be examined very favorably as historians look closely at President Bush’s legacy. The commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue also deserves praise.
Moving on to some of the most important failures of his administration, I believe that the decision to launch the Iraq War overshadows everything else. There are so many reasons to find fault with the decision to go into a war that one would run out of space if one had to list them all. One cannot do justice if one were not to mention the 4,173 lives lost of U.S. service men and women, not to mention, another approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives that have been lost since the invasion.3 Yet to me the biggest loss from the Iraq war has the useless distraction that it created for the American polity and the bitterness it has sown. Costly as the war has been, the biggest cost of the war in my opinion has been the inordinate amount of focus on the war to the detriment of virtually the entire legislative agenda, whether it be on Social Security and Medicare reform or Immigration reform. Social Security and Medicare reform is something that is likely to have the next President’s attention and short of ghastly tax hikes or dramatic cut in promised benefits (my preferred route), the Social Security Trust funds will start seeing more withdrawals than deposits from 2043 onwards.4 To his credit, President Bush did make some hesitant attempts to reform these two welfare programs early on in his second tenure, yet the lack of support from Congressional Democrats and some Congressional Republicans, sealed its fate. The same could be said of the President’s well-founded efforts at immigration reform which would have acknowledged the ground reality of illegal immigration and struck the right balance between treating human beings humanely and enforcing the rule of the law. Yet the fate of that too was sealed because of opposition from members of the House and the Senate and the President’s own depleted political capital, courtesy of the Iraq War did not help. When history is written, it just seems to me that the inability to get any substantial reform passed in a host of very important domestic policy matters, especially during his second term, will be seen as having been critical to the nation’s dismal state at the end of 2008.
I could go on for longer but it has already been a fairly long post and I am over my self-imposed limit on how long I would want an individual post to be. However before I do so, I cannot not pay a token nod to the electoral landscape of this week’s election. Has the legacy of President Bush affected the fortunes of the Republican Party and does the end of his tenure mark the beginning of a major political realignment of the American political scene? I will try to answer it in two parts. First, taking somewhat of a short term, it is clear that President Bush’s popularity ratings were the kiss of death for John McCain’s Presidential bid. In spite of Senator McCain’s consistent record of having been a maverick on several issues and broken from President Bush on a host of matters, the Democrats were able to successfully link President Bush and Senator McCain together and that was the beginning of the end for Senator McCain’s bid. Therefore in the short term, it is clear that President Bush has been a huge liability for the Party and its individual candidates during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. However at a second level, over a longer time horizon of say 10 years, it is not guaranteed that the Republican Party cannot address the overcome the ghosts of these past 8 years. Doing so successfully will however mean addressing some thorny issues that have been raised by President Bush’s 8 years in office: What stance will the Party take on immigration reform? How will it best address the insecurities of the American public caused by economic liberalization and globalization without turning back on free trade? Will it continue to oppose stem cell research (as President Bush did with the first veto of his tenure in 2006 after nearly 6 years in office, something where I would again differ with the President) or will it have a more agnostic stance on the matter and let individual leaders of the party vote their own conscience on the matter? Answering these questions will be key to revitalizing the Republican Party and ensuring its continued relevance in the days ahead. Hope this has informed your views of the 43rd President somewhat. Ciao! Good night!
Cites:
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Roberts,_Jr.
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito
3 http://www.npr.org/news/specials/tollofwar/tollofwarmain.html
4 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916024_mz007.htm
Some may question the timing: The new President-elect doesn’t take office till the 20th of January, 2009, over two months away from today during which President Bush could still manage to get some major accomplishments under his belt or commit blunders, depending on which one you think him naturally more pre-disposed to. And as the President likes to point out himself to the Press corps that historians are still examining George Washington’s record and writing books about him to this day. Indeed “His Excellency: George Washington” on the life and times of our first President was a best seller in very recent times. So one shouldn’t be surprised if in 2235 A.D. people are still critically looking at whether the Iraq War was conducted appropriately or not and whether George Bush should have fired Donald Rumsfeld earlier than when he did. Yet, looking at the barrage of criticism that President Bush has been subjected to, I have considered giving people somewhat of a more balanced and less vitriolic portrait of our current President than what one might get from the mainstream liberal media and certainly from what one might get from Bill Maher.
In standard McKinsey style which I am yet to quite give up, let me start with what I believe have been the achievements of his administration. To me the most important accomplishment of President Bush has been to prevent another terrorist strike on the U.S. since 9/11, a feat which is rarely acknowledged or even recognized. Many of the readers of my blog, probably like myself, hail from India, and if they still happen to frequent rediff.com or Indiatimes.com, then they would know that in the last 4 years of the Manmohan Singh administration, terrorist attacks have become a recurring activity and those, unlike in the past, have not just been confined to Kashmir. Indeed they have taken place across the length and breadth of the country with such impunity that Non-Resident Indians like us continue to be worried about the safety of our relatives back home in India. And to no small measure, that has directly resulted from withdrawal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) that had been introduced by the B.J.P.-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and passed in a special joint session of Parliament. No doubt the fundamental weakness of Manmohan Singh himself as a Prime Minister has played a part in exacerbating the problems, but the withdrawal of POTA and the inability of the present United Democratic Front government to tackle the issue head-on is also to blame.
And it is not just India where Islamic terrorists have continued to wreak havoc. Places across the world in Spain, U.K., Indonesia, not to mention, Israel have been subjected to repeated terrorist attacks since 9/11, yet we haven’t had one as yet (and hope we never do). In large measure, I would credit President Bush for having provided leadership on the issue and enabled us to be safe and secure, facilitated in large measure by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Some champions of personal liberty and freedom as well as some loonies from the left (these are two distinct groups, just to be clear, the first I can reason with, the second one I can’t) would clamor about how the NSA has tapped phones of ordinary Americans in the attempt to keep us safe. Leaving aside the relative merits of that highly-contested position, I am of the opinion that I would rather have my cell phone conversations with my family and friends tapped rather than be blown up into smithereens when I am buying groceries at Giant Eagle or renting a video at Blockbuster. For all the personal qualities of President Obama that he has shown (or his supporters have attributed to him even if he hasn’t displayed them), a trait which seems to be lacking in him is his inability to clearly see the threat of Islamic terrorism and recognize it as the menace it is. Indeed if you are not even willing to recognize the problem and refuse it to call it by what it is (as is the case in U.K. where Gordon Brown banned the use of the word “Muslim” in the context of terrorist attacks), the chances that you will be able to deal with it are slim. Heavens forbid, should we have a terrorist attack in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles a few months into an Obama administration and should that turn out to be the direct consequence of more curbs on what the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been permitted to do, the American public is less likely to be enamored with Barack and is more likely to finally acknowledge the contributions of President Bush.
Beyond his ability to curb terrorism, what else do I believe have been the other notable accomplishments of his administration? Well, something that I have been always thrilled about has been the nomination of two extremely committed and brilliant set of judges to the highest court of the land, the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. John Roberts is the kind of the super-star everyone would like to have on their team. Summa-cum-laude from Harvard Law School, he was a Partner at Hogan & Hartson, one of the most prestigious law firms in the capital at the age of 37!1 Samuel Alito has had an equally impressive resume having been schooled at the crème-de-la-crème of the nation, Princeton University and Yale Law School and having served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit prior to being nominated to the Supreme Court.2 The narrow conservative majority of 5-4 (and I am including Justice Kennedy in the cabal of five even though he has often defected to the other side) have enabled citizens of D.C. to enjoy their Second Amendment rights or parents in Seattle and Kentucky to successfully challenge school busing programs. I am less familiar personally with some of the justices that President Bush has appointed to the federal courts, yet if my memory serves me correctly, justices such as Janice Roger Browns, Priscilla Owen and William Pryor have also been nominated and subsequently confirmed by the Senate under his watch. All of these justices are committed to the principles on which our constitution was written and are not likely to engage in judicial activism of the kind displayed by the judges on the California State Supreme Court who have repeatedly tried to play God by legalizing gay marriage after the voters in that state have repeatedly voted to overturn it, including as recently as this past Tuesday.
Moving on to foreign policy, the failures of his administration have been more numerous than his accomplishments. Yet I believe the decision to engage more closely with India, the largest and most thriving multi-party democracy in the world (and my motherland!) and get the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act passed will be examined very favorably as historians look closely at President Bush’s legacy. The commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue also deserves praise.
Moving on to some of the most important failures of his administration, I believe that the decision to launch the Iraq War overshadows everything else. There are so many reasons to find fault with the decision to go into a war that one would run out of space if one had to list them all. One cannot do justice if one were not to mention the 4,173 lives lost of U.S. service men and women, not to mention, another approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives that have been lost since the invasion.3 Yet to me the biggest loss from the Iraq war has the useless distraction that it created for the American polity and the bitterness it has sown. Costly as the war has been, the biggest cost of the war in my opinion has been the inordinate amount of focus on the war to the detriment of virtually the entire legislative agenda, whether it be on Social Security and Medicare reform or Immigration reform. Social Security and Medicare reform is something that is likely to have the next President’s attention and short of ghastly tax hikes or dramatic cut in promised benefits (my preferred route), the Social Security Trust funds will start seeing more withdrawals than deposits from 2043 onwards.4 To his credit, President Bush did make some hesitant attempts to reform these two welfare programs early on in his second tenure, yet the lack of support from Congressional Democrats and some Congressional Republicans, sealed its fate. The same could be said of the President’s well-founded efforts at immigration reform which would have acknowledged the ground reality of illegal immigration and struck the right balance between treating human beings humanely and enforcing the rule of the law. Yet the fate of that too was sealed because of opposition from members of the House and the Senate and the President’s own depleted political capital, courtesy of the Iraq War did not help. When history is written, it just seems to me that the inability to get any substantial reform passed in a host of very important domestic policy matters, especially during his second term, will be seen as having been critical to the nation’s dismal state at the end of 2008.
I could go on for longer but it has already been a fairly long post and I am over my self-imposed limit on how long I would want an individual post to be. However before I do so, I cannot not pay a token nod to the electoral landscape of this week’s election. Has the legacy of President Bush affected the fortunes of the Republican Party and does the end of his tenure mark the beginning of a major political realignment of the American political scene? I will try to answer it in two parts. First, taking somewhat of a short term, it is clear that President Bush’s popularity ratings were the kiss of death for John McCain’s Presidential bid. In spite of Senator McCain’s consistent record of having been a maverick on several issues and broken from President Bush on a host of matters, the Democrats were able to successfully link President Bush and Senator McCain together and that was the beginning of the end for Senator McCain’s bid. Therefore in the short term, it is clear that President Bush has been a huge liability for the Party and its individual candidates during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. However at a second level, over a longer time horizon of say 10 years, it is not guaranteed that the Republican Party cannot address the overcome the ghosts of these past 8 years. Doing so successfully will however mean addressing some thorny issues that have been raised by President Bush’s 8 years in office: What stance will the Party take on immigration reform? How will it best address the insecurities of the American public caused by economic liberalization and globalization without turning back on free trade? Will it continue to oppose stem cell research (as President Bush did with the first veto of his tenure in 2006 after nearly 6 years in office, something where I would again differ with the President) or will it have a more agnostic stance on the matter and let individual leaders of the party vote their own conscience on the matter? Answering these questions will be key to revitalizing the Republican Party and ensuring its continued relevance in the days ahead. Hope this has informed your views of the 43rd President somewhat. Ciao! Good night!
Cites:
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Roberts,_Jr.
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito
3 http://www.npr.org/news/specials/tollofwar/tollofwarmain.html
4 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_03/b3916024_mz007.htm
Labels: American Presidents, George W. Bush, Iraq War, John Roberts, Samuel Alito
posted by sutirthabagchi | 11:31 AM
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