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January 25, 2009
The Mistakes of President Bush
While I think that on some big issues the former President Bush was correct, on many issues, Bush was wrong, or did things very poorly. I believe his tax cuts, especially for the very wealthy were pointless. His expansion of drug benefits added a huge and cumbersome element to the large Federal deficit. His effort to privatize social security was dead as soon as he proposed it and yet he wasted the first 8 months of his second term stupidly flogging this dead horse.
When it was clear in May of 2004 that Bush was going to push this social security reform in the face of massive opposition I told my spouse "I think it likely that Bush will accomplish nothing in domestic policy during his second term". I was nearly correct. Sad.
The biggest problem with the Bush presidency was his lack of engagement with the people who were attacking his administration and policies. Powerline has a very good assessment of the Bush presidency and its failures here. This is a quote from them:
Bush's great failing was that his focus was almost exclusively on policy, and he was unwilling to pay adequate attention to politics. This failing manifested itself repeatedly throughout his term in office. With hindsight, the beginning of the end for Bush was his unwillingness to defend himself when he was attacked for the "sixteen words" in his State of the Union address--words that were indisputably true. The same thing happened after Hurricane Katrina, the event that got his second term off on the wrong foot. In truth, the federal response to Katrina was both the largest and the fastest response to any natural disaster in world history. Yet Bush was never willing to stand up to his critics and make the case in his own defense.That tendency to turn the other cheek was, in the end, fatal. Bush never cared much about politics. He was almost contemptuous of political leadership, willing to engage in politics on a sustained basis only in his two successful election campaigns. But he was a politician, and the job of a politician, as President, is to use political skills to lead the American people. Bush's unwillingness or inability to do what it would take to be an effective political leader, in the end undid his administration.
It always amazed me how bloggers were capable of punching 10 foot holes in the arguments of the Bush haters - yet President Bush refused to actually use his Bully Pulpit to do the same. This really was a huge failure of political will on the President's part. The Vice President was out trying to convince people but Dick Cheney never had much traction with the public.
There are lots of problems with the Bush administration, he is hardly our worst president but there were many things he could have done better.
Posted by rakhier at January 25, 2009 08:56 AM