A couple weeks ago, I read a blog post about Bush, and about the unfair way in which both right and left have portrayed him, and in my comment on that article, I said I should write a blog post giving a more balanced picture of his eight years in office. As I mentioned unfair reporting about Bush in a recent post, I figure the time has come.

First, let us not forget that Bush inherited a bad situation from Clinton. Granted, welfare reform had helped somewhat, and a few other measures the Republicans of 94 had managed to force through. But, on the other hand, taxes were higher than they had been in the 80's, and the economy was in a bad state, having recovered to the degree it did following the dot-com crash only through the expedient of heavy inflation, which also exacerbated the (unknown at the time) incipient lending crisis. The world situation was bad as well. Clinton had allowed terrorists to continue unchecked, convincing them we were a toothless threat. He had revived the PLO and weakened Israel through his efforts. And, worst of all, thanks to his social engineering and budget cuts he had gutted the military while deploying it in a many tiny conflicts around the world. At the same time, he had also made worse the destruction of our intelligence agencies started by Carter, though in Clinton's case it came about by emphasizing "technology" at the expense of human intelligence.

So Bush was not exactly receiving a country at its best when he took office. Nor did it help that the struggle with Gore had already turned the press against him. The moment he took office, not only was the press immediately questioning his "legitimacy" and rambling about a "divided nation", they were also immediately trying to blame him for the incredibly shaky economy Clinton had created. And, despite Bush's almost pathological need to "work with the opposition", the press also insisted on portraying him as an extremist ideologue.

But moving past the bad economy he inherited and the sorely depleted military, as well as the festering terrorist threat Clinton had done nothing to cure, let us look at how Bush acquitted himself.

Domestically, Bush was something of a mixed bag. Not that we can claim he lied to us. he ran as a "compassionate conservative" who had worked with the opposition, so we knew he was not going to be  a hard line, small government conservative. Despite that, he started relatively strong, pushing tax cuts. Though he allowed them to include a damaging sunset clause, they were the first meaningful tax reform in quite some time, and they succeeded in proving once again that the Laffer curve works, and that our tax rates are still far above optimal.

His other actions were a bit less successful. No Child Left Behind is a mixed bag, useful by imposing some sort of uniform standards, preventing school districts from cooking the books¹, but also harmful by introducing a massive new source of funding for the Department of Education, which Republicans  had once promised to eliminate. There are also grounds for complaint in that it represents yet another imposition of federal controls into what was once a state matter.

Much worse was the battle over prescription coverage. Some will claim Bush was forced into providing something in order to get coverage passed through congress, but I disagree. Bush did not reluctantly concede, he started negotiations with a huge government entitlement. His opening position was one that sounds like a Democrat platform item. And worse still, even after he proposed a plan that basically gave the Democrats everything they wanted, they rejected it. I thought at that point Bush would have learned the Democrats were so ideologically motivated they woudl never work with him, but he did not. Sadly, he continued struggling for compromise, ignoring their open hostility and obstructionism. As a result, we now have an gigantic entitlement, added on to the already bankruptcy bound Medicare/Medicaid program, and a program the true cost of which we cannot even begin to estimate. Worst of all, despite his approval of gargantuan spending increases, the Democrats and the press managed to portray it as insufficient, meaning that Bush concede to this huge welfare program, authorized massive spending, and still ended up as a stingy failure in the public mind.

And yet he still struggle for "consensus."

His next big proposal, and one of his campaign positions, was the need to reform social security. But, sadly, by the time he got around to attempting this, he had expended too much political capital on foreign affairs to push anything through congress. He had lost the PR war tot he Democrats, both through their success in beating him up over prescription coverage, and through the media's constant drumbeat of failure in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Republicans were not that strongly in his corner either. Having seen him basically adopt the Democrat position on prescription coverage, attempt to push through cronies as supreme court justices, and then seeing him fail to control his own party in the aftermath of Democrat filibusters, the party rank and file was no longer in his corner, and so Social Security reform died on the vine.

There were a number of other, smaller programs, such as his "faith based initiatives", which were modestly successful, but generally not important enough to merit comment. And, as Bush's presidency progressed, such programs tended to fade from notice. Not only because other matters distracted public attention, but because, as Bush's popularity waned he simply did not have the support to push through such small programs, and he could no longer afford to squander what goodwill he had left on such things.

Which brings us to his other major domestic efforts, court appointments.For the most part, Bush did a fine job of appointing judges. Excluding the Meyers fiasco, his selections were both top notch judges and pleasingly far to the right of Bush's own beliefs. And he did a good job of bringing enough public attention to his Supreme Court nominees that the Senate Democrats were nto willing to challenge him by trying to filibuster their appointments.

If only I could say the same about his appointments to lower courts. I can say they were equally competent jurists, in fact they were a better grade of judge than most Clinton era appointments. But, unfortunately, Bush simply could not manage to get them through the approval process. And, sadly, his belief in cooperation prevented him from challenging the Democrats right away when they started to filibuster his choices. Despite Bush's relatively quiet acceptance of Democrat obstructionism, eventually the problem did become so severe that Senate Republicans did begin to threaten a rules change, removing the ability to filibuster judicial nominee approvals, but then Bush failed to control his own party. Granted, McCain is the one to blame for the whole "Gang of 14" affair, and he deserves the bulk of the blame, but nothing prevented the senate Republicans, or even Bush himself, from continuing to push for the elimination of filibuster. The Gang of 14 could have been put on the spot, asked to decide between their little cabal and their party, and likely Bush would have won. Instead, both the president and the senators let the matter drop, leaving the Democrats free to filibuster his and future presidents' judicial nominees. Not only was it a bad tactical move, but it made the Bush administration appear weak.

But let us turn from the hit and miss domestic record and look at the one area in which Bush truly deserve praise, his handling of foreign affairs.

I know the press has painted a picture of a war mongering Bush pushing us into failed wars, but the truth is quite different. I won't go through all the history, as it should be quite familiar, but I will point out some real achievements. And there are several.

Ever since Regan's retreat from Beirut, we have been giving the impression that terrorism will intimidate the US. At worst we will flee, as we did in Beirut, or as we effectively did from Mogadishu. At best, we will "treat it as a police matter". Terrorists, safely ensconced in a friendly Moslem state, knew they had nothing to fear from the US. At worst, a US president facing domestic problems might blow up a few empty tents.  Not only did we ignore terrorists, but we allowed them to color our foreign policy, whether in seriously considering cutting off support to Israel, or Bill Clinton's efforts to revive the nearly destroyed PLO.

Bush ended all that with his attack on Afghanistan. Suddenly Libya stopped their WMD programs. Syria withdrew from Lebanon. Even Iran showed signs of stopping their missile programs. Bush had instilled fear int he minds of rogue nations. And his subsequent attack on Iraq only added to that. Suddenly the US was no longer a paper tiger, we were a nation to fear. And the evidence is indisputable. Nations givign up weapons programs, other nations cooperating in tracking down terrorists for the first time. No domestic terrorist attacks².

Unfortunately, though Bush stood firm, the rest of the nation did not. The press pushed the line that Afghanistan was the "new Vietnam" and a "quagmire". Then they shifted their attention to Iraq, arguing Iran was Vietnam and Afghanistan was where we "should" have our troops. They began to hammer Bush day after day about civilian deaths, about torture, about violation of rights, about a lack of progress. They continually charged him with having fabricated evidence, ignoring any inconvenient facts. And worse still, they started trying to find any incident they could blow up into a war crime, hoping to implicate Bush, regardless of the effect it had on troop morale, and without a thought of whether or not the soldiers they so used were innocent or guilty. They even tried to condemn him for not perfectly anticipating every development in the conflict, or for sustaining any casualties at all during wartime.

And the terrorists and rogue nations noticed. Seeing Bush's dropping approval numbers, and the Democrat victories of 2006, followed by Nancy Pelosi's pseudo-diplomatic trip, they began slowly to return to their old ways, sure that in 2008 they would be facing a much less aggressive US.  But that can't be laid at Bush's feet. Bush himself held true to his beliefs, following the course he had laid out despite declining popularity. So, in that respect, I must say Bush was  a rousing success, one of the few modern presidents who remained true to their beliefs (in this respect, anyway) despite the cost in terms of popular support.

Which brings us to the closing days of the Bush administration and the current financial woes. Though Bush gets the lion's share of the blame, when it isn't being aimed at "Wall Street greed", the truth is the problems we face are largely the result of the Carter era Community Reinvestment Act, made worse by a Clinton era liberalization of the process. Yes, it was made worse by Bush's obsession with maintaining low interest rates through monetary inflation, but that was a policy he carried over from the Clinton era as well. Though Bush is not free of blame in all this, he is as close to blame free as any politician. The Republicans did try to remedy the problems with Fannie and Freddie, only to be obstructed by Democrats in the senate. So, Bush did try to fix things, even if he did not do the noble thing and tell us all we had to take our lumps, cut off the low interest spigot and let the market correct itself. But I have yet to hear of a politician bold enough to do that, so it makes little sense to blame Bush for not being superior to his every contemporary.

The only real black mark has to be his readiness to shell out money for bailouts. Granted, every politician (with a few exceptions) seems ready to bail out whatever industry comes along, but in his redirecting of financial bailout money to the automakers, Bush seems a bit more eager than most. And that may be a final, small black mark against him.

But then again, the history of the present day will not be written for some time. So it remains to be seen who will seem the heroes and villains in this debacle.

Overall, Bush's history is a bit of a mixed bag, but not as much as many would claim. He may have had a rather inconsistent domestic record, but on the foreign policy front he has been remarkably consistent, more so than any recent politician. In an era of pragmatic flip flops, Bush has had a singularity of vision very few display, at least in his foreign policy.

And I think in the end that will be what history recalls of the present era. The financial fiasco may make it into the footnotes, but I think in generations to come, Bush will be recalled as the man who turned the tide of Islamic terrorism, and honestly, that is how he deserves to be recalled.

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1. Having a mother for a teacher, I know many teachers complain such tests lead to teachers "teaching to the test", and that is sometimes a valid complaint. However, if the test is a realistic test of necessary knowledge, that may not always be the bad thing teachers claim it is. However, let us separate the quality of the test from the question of whether tests are useful at all. My problem is, without a uniform national test, schools tend to "normalize" tests over and over, silently lowering standards to allow for continually improving test scores while producing ever less educated students. Were there no DoEd money, this would not matter, but if we are distributing federal funds, we do need to know whether the money is achieving its purposes, and for that some sort of uniform test is essential. Especially since those providing evaluations are not inclined to honestly evaluate themselves absent such a test.

2. It is quite significant that terrorist attacks have once again become an overseas phenomenon. Once again, terrorists are afraid to attack Americans on our own soil. Doubtless they have agents here who could carry out such attacks, but they are not doing so. Most likely, the nations hosting them are a bit concerned that an attack inside the US may result in a fate similar to that of the Taliban, and are encouraging their terrorist guests to limit themselves to overseas attacks.