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 What Can Obama Learn From Bush?Posted on Jan 20, 2009By E.J. Dionne For many of us, the end of George W. Bush’s presidency could not come quickly enough. But as power changes hands peacefully, the result of a decisive democratic verdict, the most important question is: What can our new president learn from the one heading back to Texas? The Bush administration’s specific failures—in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties—are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics. From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized. Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue. It is in part because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality. Advertisement Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not win. Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress with political threats and campaign trail rhetoric on the eve of a midterm election. “It’s better to fight them there than here” was not an argument that took the average citizen’s intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking citizens to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own. Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush’s larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success. Bush’s prescription drug plan under Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect, but they reflected broadly shared goals—expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education—and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation. Aspects of both programs will endure. Bush’s dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements. For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terror for electoral advantage. A hyper-partisan domestic politics of us-versus-them followed naturally from the president’s instinct to confuse moral certainty for moral clarity. In his farewell address, he reminded his listeners yet again that “good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise.” Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security versus liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq versus a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein). Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition. But he is decidedly not an us-versus-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. It’s not enough. But it’s a start. E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is postchat(at)aol.com. © 2009, Washington Post Writers Group Previous item: Still Dreaming After All These Years Next item: It's Over -- and Not a Moment Too Soon Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment
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By vegdude, January 27 at 7:07 pm #
I’d like to hope that Obama will be different than Bush, but the same folks tend to call the shots regardless of who nominally holds the power.
What I’m hoping for fundamentally is less about him (or Bush) and more about us. I’m hoping that Obama will help to reignite a conversation about what our nation is about. Because, in the end, the president is not supposed to rule our nation. WE are. It was founded as an experiment in liberty. The events of recent years have been disturbing, for sure, but they need not be fatal to the concept of liberty. What would be, however, is if we gave up what little is left of it, in exchange for progress toward eliminating “global warming” or bailouts or war in Pakistan or continuing our debt-driven, mercantilist “economy” for a few more weeks or months.
What we ought to do instead . . hopefully with Obama’s leadership, but even without it if necessary . . . is to rededicate ourselves both individually and collectively to the ideals of liberty, justice, and rule of law. With those things, the rest will take care of themselves. With liberty, unburdened by government meddling, the economy would soon heal. With liberty, unmixed with corporatism, fascism and militarism, we would stop making enemies and provoking terror throughout the world.
With liberty, our many differences would stop becoming a point of contention and argument and debate, and become a source of strength instead, which I firmly believe is what God had in mind all along when He created each of us so unique and so different, in so many ways, than all of the rest of us.
Report thisBy PSmith, January 22 at 2:20 am #
DON’T ... Contd
12. Others aren’t convinced. Particularly the relatives of 1.4m dead Iraqis, the 4m exiled or displaced and their relatives. AND 4,000 service personnel who are regrettably dead. Unfortunately 40,000 more are not dead and are badly injured. They vote. Their families vote. Their friends, coworkers and newspaper readers vote. You look like an @$$HOLE again. Back to normal. For you.
13. Things are not going well for you politically. Something tells us that we can leave your story here. Because whatever happens we know one thing. You will always do the wrong thing. Pick the wrong man. BONKERS BOLTON at the UN for a delicate diplomatic job - JESUS H. CHRIST ON A BICYCLE. You are an A$$HOLE.
And history will so record. Had you avoided the temptation, you would have been like the rest of us. Well sort of. But richer. An amiable, wealthy rich guy. Now you will be famous. ER, sorry, that should read infamous.
But as a wise man said of life, whatever your seat at the opera, it has been a great show. Some others, who thought that being the villain on stage might have been fun, will now think better of it and stay very firmly in the audience. Who knows ... in about a hundred years your country may have come to terms with the destruction you have wrought upon it. Single handed.
Not many men can say that they humbled a superpower. Of course, most try to avoid doing it to their own superpower. But we know that you are certainly not ‘most.’ And, hey, lots of people will be grateful to you. Unfortunately, none of them are American. But Americans only make up two percent of the world’s population. So that may be a good thing.
Report thisBy PSmith, January 22 at 2:14 am #
DON’T ...
What can Obama learn Bush? Thankfully nothing he and we don’t already know. We already know:
1. Don’t let people persuade you to run for an office you are not qualified for. You will be a SOCK PUPPET and people will mock you. You can have a nice life, and be smarter than 95% of folk. But in that job you need to be smarter than 99.99%, and that is HUGE difference.
2. Don’t use your CIA / Re-ptilian Party friends to steal an election you lost. Even your parents country club friends, Connecticut Muffy and Buffy, will (eventually) think that it looks tacky. History WON"T even be that (un)kind. NO Sirree. HISTORY WON’T BE KIND AT ALL.
3. Don’t associate with the CRAZIES FROM THE BASEMENT of your Dad’s lame administration. You know them - Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other NEOCON @$$HOLES.
4. Don’t let the @$$HOLE party chairman appointed to find you a running mate come back, shrug his shoulders, and say that he couldn’t find anyone but that he is willing to help you out. If you fall for that, see 1. above.
5. Don’t steal the 2000 election, because then the pi$$ed-off protesters at your inauguration will mean that there will be a near-riot during your inauguration. You will look like one of Shakespeare loser kings who either stole the crown or killed the rightful king. Again, you look like a WORLD CLASS CREEP. You haven’t even started your administration, but already THE PEOPLE START TO HATE YOU. BAD. VERY BAD.
6. Don’t let the @$$HOLE party chairman, now your Vice-President, run your government.
7. Don’t let the NEOCON @$$HOLES cut a deal with the Zionist @$$HOLES to fake an attack by nineteen goat-herders on two 100 story building in New York. Particularly don’t let them claim that they did it with ‘box-cutters.’ People will think that you are mocking their intelligence.
8. Don’t let the @$$HOLE party chairman, now your Vice-President give very strange commands on the day of the attack. From the corridor leading to the bunker. Between 9.20am and 10.00am. You will have to ensure that the inquiry fails to note or investigate said commands. Conspiracy researchers will have a field day - see locations / times noted. Before the internet this would have taken twenty years. NOT GOOD. This is another of, by now, many nails in your political coffin. But it is all too late, far too late. You are doomed, DOOMED we say.
9. Don’t let the NEOCON @$$HOLES tell you that this is what is needed to start a war with the head of state who may have tried to have your Daddy killed in Kuwait. That is, a war with Iraq.
10. Particularly don’t listen when a major CRAZY FROM THE BASEMENT, Rumsfeld tells the Chief of Staff, Shinseki that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when he says that you will need 300,000 men and the CRAZY says “Nah. We can do it with 160,000.” There is a reason that the CRAZY is called the CRAZY and the other guy is a Chief of Staff. And it doesn’t mean that the CRAZY is they guy to listen to.
11. You go ahead anyway, ‘cause otherwise you would have had to ‘read stuff,’ and you hate ‘reading stuff.’ The CRAZY WAS CRAZY. You did need 300,000. FUBAR. ClusterFu$k FUBAR. MegaMega Cluster .. etc. You are forced, just forced, to keep 150,000 servicemen and women and 180,000 mercenaries there permanently. But you are sitting on $30T (T as in Trillion) dollars worth of OIL. You are officially a GENIUS. (According to UK comedy program Bremner, Bird and Fortune).
To be Contd ...
Report thisBy GB, January 21 at 9:52 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Well we know one thing is clear.
Report thisBush and Cheney created a huge smoke screen and committed the largest heist of our treasure, American and foriegn lives, civil rights, and historical truth in the world’s history.
What a legacy. Making Caligula proud.
There is nothing Obama could learn from these criminals but to not prosecute their crimes would be a huge mistake.
By HC, January 21 at 6:29 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Why is so much verbiage being expended on what can be learned from an incompetent, unrepentant, malicious buffoon with a barely subsurface contempt for human beings? There was no chance of anything worthwhile coming out of a Dumbya Presidency, his life record before that time clearly established that. The Obama Presidency has been taken as an example that in America, anything is possible. What we found out from the Dumbya Presidency is that in America, anything can happen, and God help us.
Report thisBy SODIUM, January 21 at 4:52 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Who said that Obama can learn nothing from Bush?
Are you kidding me?
Obama can learn a great deal from Bush:
(1)He should go to the United Nations and tell the 190 plus sovereign nations what to do and piss them off one by one.
(2)Obama should do as Bush did:divide the nations of the world into two categories:
-Axis of evil.
-Axis of good.
Of course we, and any other country that agrees with us,are the axis of good to the point of screwing off the 190 plus sovereign nations;and screwing up the the environment until breathing fresh air becomes something of the past-a sort of pipe dream.The Axis of evil is every body else that disagees with our policy and this is a splendid way to create good enemies and that may lead to ultimate disasters,one after the other.Hence keep the military Industrial Complex
and its derivities such as Blackwater fleecing the U.S. treasury
(3)Obama can learn from Bush how to be a slave to his own rhetorics,ranging from “Mission Accomlished” to “Cut and Run” To “When the Iraqis can Stand-Up,we will Stand-Down”.How in the world can any body Stand-Down?
This is just the tip the of a new field created by Bush and cohorts;one might call it the art
Report thisof rhetoricology.Bush has exelled in this art to a point of screwing up so badly,he left nothing,repeat nothing, unscrewed.
By DivinTn, January 21 at 11:42 am #
most bad thing ever happened for US was last two wars where was involved ... Lets hope new administration will have other ways to combat terrorism other than wars ...
Report thisBy Mike, January 21 at 8:52 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
This is the second time this morning that I’ve read of Bushs “successes” - NCLB and Prescription Drug Reform. These are hardly successes and I don’t need to explain myself as to why, the reasons are well known. Mr. Dionne and Ms. Cocco need to find something else to call Bush “successes” if they can.
Report thisBy Trigger finger, January 20 at 9:13 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
What can you learn from a mental midget?
Stay off the brain dissolving killer drugs and booze!
Report thisBy Inherit The Wind, January 20 at 8:06 pm #
Nothing.
There is nothing positive that Bush can teach Obama. Just lots of negatives to avoid. Bush not only did everything wrong, he found ways to do it “wronger”.
OK. Maybe one thing positive: When your time is up, the best thing you can do for your country is be gracious and helpful to your successor. (and hope he doesn’t prosecute you!)
Report thisBy coloradokarl, January 20 at 4:15 pm #
The Bush Doctrine: Spend ALL the money. When it seems all gone,look deeper, there’s always more. Then when all other options are explored, Beg, Borrow and then Steal into the future Generations. That’s what Pro-Life is all about…..Right?
Report thisBy hippy pam, January 20 at 10:28 am #
President Obama and team have learned HOW NOT TO GOVERN!!!!!!!
Report this