Bush: Beset, Besieged Yet Relaxed Amid “Sustained Rejection” By Public
The Washington Post (which seems to be way ahead of the New York Times in terms of detailed national reporting these days) has yet another fascinating story about the deepening crisis facing the Bush administration — this time focusing on President George W. Bush.
And writer Peter Baker doesn’t pull his punches: he bluntly states what many people have hinted or said more diplomatically. America has seldom seen a President soar so high, hold national unity within his hand and either let it slip away or throw it away (pick the cause according to your own political persuasion).
The key paragraph in this article is buried a bit further down:
The reality has been daunting by any account. No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public. Bush’s approval rating slipped below 50 percent in Washington Post-ABC News polls in January 2005 and has not topped that level in the 30 months since. The last president mired under 50 percent so long was Harry S. Truman. Even Richard M. Nixon did not fall below 50 percent until April 1973, 16 months before he resigned.
Baker begins his piece with a new tidbit. Bush is now quietly inviting “leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House” to help him find some answers:
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I’m facing? How will history judge what we’ve done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?
One answer here will be what any International Relations 101 student can tell you: foreign countries don’t like it when Washington points them to the highway (after they would not just accept “my way” on Washington policies but wanted either a different policy, some input or just some extensive consultation). Diplomacy and building strong ties to many nations and working with them matters.
And here is a paragraph worth dissecting:
These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation.
But Bush and Karl Rove constructed their long-effective political high wire act in a way that did not leave any safety net: the politics of polarization, governing by the base and for the base, and eschewing efforts to build a national consensus (versus just making sure you had enough votes to win and win elections or ram things through Congress) left NO safety net.
And a drip-drip-drip of assertions that didn’t hold up created a credibility gap reminscent of the problems that faced Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. MORE:
Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course.
To his supporters, this has long been a Bush strength: his inner convictions and strength. To his critics, it’s a character flaw: he seemingly persist not necessarily because of ideals but because he made a decision and he is the one whose decisions count in the end. And he remains serenely confident in his own judgment — because it is his judgment.
What can’t be spun, is the fact that this piece paints a portrait of a President seemingly now as isolated as LBJ during the Vietnam War, or Nixon’s at the height of Watergate:
“I don’t know how he copes with it,” said Donald Burnham Ensenat, a friend for 43 years who just stepped down as State Department protocol officer. Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), another longtime friend who once worked for Bush, said he looks worn down. “It’s a marked difference in his physical appearance,” Conaway said. “It’s an incredibly heavy load. When you ask men and women to take risks, to send them into war knowing they might not come home, that’s got to be an incredible burden to have on your shoulders.”
Bush is fixated on Iraq, according to friends and advisers. One former aide went to see him recently to discuss various matters, only to find Bush turning the conversation back to Iraq again and again. He recognizes that his presidency hinges on whether Iraq can be turned around in 18 months. “Nothing matters except the war,” said one person close to Bush. “That’s all that matters. The whole thing rides on that.”
The Post quotes various people saying Bush is NOT despairing, not blaming others but is serene. And he seems to feel he needs now to justify himself not so much to his critics but to…..history:
Bush has virtually given up on winning converts while in office and instead is counting on vindication after he is dead. “He almost has . . . a sense of fatalism,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who recently spent a day traveling with Bush. “All he can do is do his best, and 100 years from now people will decide if he was right or wrong. It doesn’t seem to be a false, macho pride or living in your own world. I find him to be amazingly calm.”
To an extent, Bush walls himself off from criticism. He does read newspapers, contrary to public impression, but watches little television news and does not linger in the media echo chamber. “He does a very good job of keeping out the extreme things in his life,” Conaway, the congressman, said. “He doesn’t watch Leno and Letterman. He doesn’t spend a lot of time exposing himself to that sort of stuff. He has a terrific knack of not looking through the rearview mirror.”
But some do express concern to the Post about GWB’s attitude:
Some aides see it as Bush refusing to accept reality. “The president thinks cutting and running on his friends shows weakness,” said an exasperated senior official. “Change shows weakness. Doing what everyone knows has to be done shows weakness.” Another former aide said that no matter how many people Bush consults, he heeds only two or three.
All of this suggests one thing: it is highly unlikely — though not impossible — that there will be major change while Bush is in office.
If you feel history is your ultimate judge and operate in a bit of a political cocoon then the prospect for a major soul searching and readjustment of course is difficult.
And if there isn’t much of a substantive change in terms of policy specifics and a change aimed at fostering consensus, it seems the poll numbers…and the isolation…will continue to grow.
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Oh, the humanity!
I remember the last year of the Clinton Presidency before the internet was a mass of blogoholics….the MSM was full of non stop articles about Clinton and his legacy. It seemed according to them he was overwrought with what History would make of his presidency.
Does that surprise anyone? Men who ascend to the White House are not your average Joes who hang out at “fred’s diner or billy bobs pool hall and have a few beers afore gettin in the truck and drivin home from a hard day at the saw mill”
The stunning vision of John Kerry will never leave my memory cells as he stood up on that podium and saluted and said reporting for duty. I think he lost the election that day.
Presidents are elevated to greatness as they aspire to be great. Eisenhower was a lt. colonel who was elevated to General of the entire allied forces overnight. Greatness aspires to the man and the man aspires to greatness.
Reporting for duty might be quaint but that is not what we expect from your Presidents. We ascribe to them a higher calling, right or wrong. We place upon their shoulders the weight of the entire word because they are after all handed the entire world and told to govern it with responsibility and actions that meet the approval of the entire world.
When Denmark or Sweeden or Germany or France or Canada or Australia or Chad or any one of the other 196 or so countries does something the world hardly notices. When the president speaks it is plastered in every paper from here to the Kremlin and The Red Square.
Is it odd that Bush is consumed with his legacy? Not at all. Every president is and has been because they are driven to a higher calling with more responsibility then most other world leaders. Our people demand more and our Presidents are men who want to give more. The difference between our expectations and their actual accomplishments turns out to be their true legacy.
Do the American people really demand anything great of their president? Bush was elected largely because a superficial electorate saw someone they thought they could trust because he seemed like a good guy. They decided that he was trustworthy based on the most shallow reasoning and they were betrayed by someone who claimed to be a uniter when he was anything but that.
But Bush and Karl Rove constructed their long-effective political high wire act in a way that did not leave any safety net: the politics of polarization, governing by the base and for the base, and eschewing efforts to build a national consensus (versus just making sure you had enough votes to win and win elections or ram things through Congress) left NO safety net.
To me this really says it all about Bush’s political collapse. He built an unsustainable foundation with no margin for error, and never adjusted back when it became obvious that the majority of the country was no longer with him. He made the key mistake of turning against his own countrymen when they disagreed with him, a divisive move that has engendered a lot of backlash.
BTW, I think Bush campaigned as the average Joe who promised us a humble foreign policy, but Tenet’s book and O’Neill’s claim that even as he took office the administration had the goal of regime change in Iraq, having bought into the PNAC’s charter statement.
I think the campaign image was just one that Rove manufactured, knowing that people who were tired of the high drama of the Clinton years would relish a moderate man who did not have great ambitions.
KR – Don’t forget the W bought the Crawford ranch a couple of years before he ran for POTUS. Do we see him on horse back(Reagan) or does the family have a history of farming(Carter). In W’s first political run (for US House), he potrayed himself as the East Coast elite educated pol, like daddy, and the Texas voters soundly defeated that image. I’m sorry, but his actions won’t merit a legacy like Churchill or Truman, only in W’s deluded mind. Maybe he can “thump” his chest, click those emerald slippers and go back to Kennebuckport of the 90′s.
I agree Rudi. He’ll probably come off closer to Nixon minus Nixon’s foreign policy achievements.
but his actions won’t merit a legacy like Churchill or Truman, only in W’s deluded mind.
This is funny and sad at the same time. Those who lived under Churchill or Truman were incensed at their actions, continually attempted to undermine them.
Once WW2 was over Chruchill was ousted.
Truman:
After confounding all predictions to win re-election in 1948,[2] he was able to pass almost none of his Fair Deal program.[3] He used executive orders to begin desegregation of the U.S. armed forces[4] and to launch a system of loyalty checks to remove thousands of Communist sympathizers from government office.
Had Truman done these things in todays climate he would have made GWB look Benign.
Do the American people really demand anything great of their president?
Yes they do. Why are you voting for Hillary or Obama? Are you voting for them because you expect them to be average worthless presidents? If so then why not vote for Ron Paul or Bloomberg or Kucinich?
It is precisely the fact that Bush came off as trustworthy that got him elected. He did not get elected because the people thought he was going to be one of the worst presidents in history?
I think you give the people too little credit. If we did not expect great things from Bush then we would not be angry at him. We would be thinking….well we voted for a farm boy he is doing what we expected him to do.
Somebody – Desegregation (military, housing and schools) has never been accepted by the white majority. Both Truman and Churchill successfully prosecuted a MAJOR war and made controversial decisions. Rummy and W’s prosecution of Iraq and the GWOT doesn’t rise to a competent level of fighting a war. WWII and Korea were major wars against serious enemies. FDR started a draft in 1940, against the support of the “isolationist Republicans” and Joe Kennedy, W told us to go to the mall. Truman had the “Buck stops here” desk placard, W did a video looking for WMD’s in the Oval Office. Let that be his legacy, along with groping Merkel.
Just the fact that someone was unpopular as a leader in his time for making unpopular decisions doesn’t automatically mean that they will be rescued by historians. As, Rudi pointed out there were concrete successes behind the resussitation of the reputations of Truman and Churchill. There is no more reason to think that Bush’s legacy would be salvaged than there would be that a popular president’s legacy would be sunk.
One thing thats a little disturbing, is that he seems perfectly fine with the fact that his policies have engendered so much hostility, but is finally trying to hear other voices in order to save his legacy. Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if he had allowed himself to hear a variety of opinions in the first place.
I am not saying that they were failed leaders. I am saying that they were leaders who were despised by their opponents during their day for making controversial decisions………Ring a bell.
You know like GWB and company have done today. History will be his judge. Not the antiwar.
There are many things that add to a presidents legacy. Things that transpire long after one is out of the presidency are taken into account when historians look at the legacy issues.
Lets say for example that Bush hands the war in Iraq to Hillary and she somehow manages to bring Democracy to Iraq. Fifty years from now they will be giving kudos to Bush for having the foresight to stick it out, no one around but old farts to say how bad the animosity was at the time against Bush.
So there are many things. Nafta is playing into Clintons legacy. How it turns out is part of how Historians will write him up.
He’s just angry that they weren’t even more superficial and would have voted for Gore in larger numbers while nodding their heads up and down at what Clinton and Gore told them more than anyone at a religious revival or at a jazz concert.
The Left is reactionary and ornery whenever it is rejected, which it frequently is, by much of the public.
This isn’t anything new. Don’t forget the Pew poll that had journalists (who are largely liberal, as their bias constantly reveals) positive of the public’s judgment when Democrats were elected, but reversed to a negative view when the public elected Bush instead. We know why that change happened.
It is precisely the fact that Bush came off as trustworthy that got him elected.
Bush was a desperation “brand name” candidate in 2000, brought into the race when the other Republicans proved to be duds. (Don’t expect much change in 2008.) What is neglected is how much Clinton and to a lesser extent Gore repelled people. Those who claimed they’d vote for a real chimp before voting for Bush fail to understand that so many Americans (who are not superficial, as was dishonestly stated earlier; in fact many of them are as intelligent as and more intelligent than Democratic voters as often as the opposite example can be found or merely claimed) not only distrust the Democrats, dislike the legacy of vote-buying through entitlements and excess interventionism and bureacracy, but also found Clinton and Gore highly objectionable. Clinton offended the moral while Gore seemed to be a robot and his rudeness in the debates was just the start of his loss of them.
In fact, it was during and after the debates that the public got the impression that Bush might actually be able to win, after all. Which, of course he then did. (Democratic game-playing after the election and how it offended the public only made the Bush vote wiser, at that time.)
“Superficial”: Those were the people at whom the staged, media-free-ride-broadcast, notorious post-election “conference call” was aimed!
(with predictable results from those not fooled — ha, love those reader remarks)
Actually, I was watching television on a rare moment (the bar of a restaurant I frequented where I lived at the time was run by a smart guy who always showed the important events rather than sitcoms or other teevee series) and I thought it was a clever way to start his acceptance speech, and it led me to stay and listen to more. The irony of its being done by a later war protestor for a party associated with the anti-war movement didn’t matter. Many of us non-liberals watching it laughed and said that he really burned Bush with that statement.
Bush manufactured many of his own problems with stupid short sighted policies. Churchill had a full blown war with a major world power thrust upon him, and he won it decisively. The two bear no comparison.
‘You know like GWB and company have done today. History will be his judge. Not the antiwar.’
Historians may give him a break , but I doubt it. In any case, he gets America’s judgment every time a new poll comes out and his numbers take another tumble. If 3/4 of Americans disapprove of his performance, that should be what really counts to him, not what the history books say in 100 years.
I havent’ seen any experts who are confident or even hopeful that Iraq will turn itself around-and the administrations mistakes and other defeats are glaring. In neither Truman or Churchill’s case did they suffer a defeat like we are being handed in the ME.