No, it’s not unusual for former Presidents to find themselves in a middle of an overt or covert love fest, or have opponents who hate what they did in office to look the other way. But in the case of George W. Bush and his recent library, did the good-will hyping approach public relations or is some of the criticism not quite accurate?
Now that the media event has receeded — a Presidential libary is indeed a big deal because it will be there for future generations, and even Richard Nixon got a love-fest when he opened his — the debate has truly begun. The two best examples:
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman:
But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.
From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.
But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.
Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies.
And then The Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geir:
I rarely disagree with Paul Krugman, but in this case I beg to differ. I agree that the Bush administration did indeed turn lying into a high art. The lies were bigger, deeper, more brazen, and, to use Krugman’s word, more “systematic” than ever before. A key innovation of Prevaricator-in-Chief Bush and co. were the lies they told about domestic policy. Not that it hadn’t been done before (see: Reaganomics). But Bush and crew really were bold as brass when it comes to the scale and scope of the lies they told about issues like tax cuts and the cost of Medicare Part D. Krugman’s description about how the way the administration sold these policies “amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics” rings painfully true. Lying was institutionalized to a degree that we rarely see outside outside of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes.
So yes, they took lying to a new level. But where I part company with Krugman is the idea that lying “wasn’t standard practice before” and that “the president as con man was a new character in American life.”
…Ultimately, I believe the Bush regime’s most reprehensible acts were probably the torture and the other grotesque abuses of civil liberties and human rights they perpetrated — all in the name of national security. Openly embracing torture as acceptable U.S. policy was a radical break with long-standing American norms and values. Sadly, the Obama has continued far too many of the Bush administration’s most egregious national security policies. With practices like the military tribunals and Gitmo, the Bushies institutionalized policies that, to the extent they occurred before, had existed in a grey area and on a far smaller scale, never openly or as part of an officially recognized system or organization.
Bot of them write a lot more than what appears here, so go to the original link. And that is correct: George W. Bush was not most assuredly the first President who lied to the country. Vietnam is generally thought of now as a war American got sucked into and LBJ and the military both believed certain things that proved to be wrong or kept the happy talk going hoping that something they would do would change the situation. By the vast majority of accounts now, historians will say the Bush mispresented, or if they are not polite, lied to the American people about the war — and America got sucked into it for years.
It’s the near institutionalization of false assertions given the public, and the suspending of traditional norms when it came to torture, that will be easy — or possible — to rehabilitate.
When a Presidential library is dedicated the news media is filled with all of the former President’s partisans and supporters doing what to others is spin and to them is reality: their former boss or candidate was correct, history will show they were right, etc etc.
But history does not always agree with supporters of a President or the make-nice attitude when a Presidnetial library is dedicated. And it is inescapable that Bush has a long way to go to be politically rehabilitated. If he was so great and wise in the long run, then you’d see many Republicans embracing him, quoting him, and running on him.
It’s not happening. Which says something.
UPDATE: On the other hand, Gallup notes that Presidents are often viewed more favorably after they leave office.
As the current president and former presidents gather in Dallas to open the George W. Bush presidential library, a Gallup review of presidential job approval ratings finds that presidents’ retrospective approval ratings are almost always more positive than their job approval ratings while in office. In particular, Americans rate John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan much more positively in retrospect than they did while the men were president.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.