I cried when he died. FDR was a great president in many ways but he deserves black marks for interning Japanese Americans in relocation camps. My friend Bernie was 8 years old when her family was forced to leave their home and business. Eleanor Roosevelt protested the move. In the short time he has been president, Trump moved the U. He brought home a lot of money that was staying abroad, and he lowered tax rates for most Americans. He has held friendly talks with the leader of North Korea, and before the pandemic he oversaw job growth for everyone, especially minorities.
To the editor: A provincial look at Trump, who has broken a lot of china in our shop, deems him the worst president in recent times. Column: Yes, Democrats have a messaging problem. The bigger problem is who has the megaphone. Op-Ed: Abortion restrictions widely punish military women. Editorial: USC tarnishes its reputation again, this time with for-profit recruitment tactics. All Sections.
About Us. B2B Publishing. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
In the s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Buckley Jr. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the midterm elections — but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians.
Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff — a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition — represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change.
Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making. The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed.
Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems. U ntil the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well — including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars.
James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of , and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents.
Bush has more in common with post Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way.
On September 10th, , he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle.
But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein.
In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons.
The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. When William F. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.
White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans who want more low-wage immigrant workers from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture.
The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove. The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine.
Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in , although the story may be apocryphal.
But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them — much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit.
Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence.
During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. As Suskind tells it :. The day before, the adviser had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. The fact of the matter was that in this area of policy, this adviser was one of the experts, really top-drawer, and had been instrumental in devising some of the very language now used to discuss these concepts.
According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. I thought you got that. But Bush knew better—on what basis, who knows? This fact was brought home to me a year or so after Bush left office when I ran into a woman I knew from graduate school.
She had spent decades working in the government on arms control and was a strong Republican. She confided to me that her office had sent many reports to the Oval Office explaining that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, all of which were ignored. After his departure from office, foreign officials who had worked with him expressed astonishment at his ignorance and lack of intelligence.
As such, it was difficult for us to communicate with him. I bring all of this up, of course, because of Donald Trump, whose stupidity I have discussed previously and who is killing thousands of Americans weekly from his incompetent handling of the coronavirus. That is, deaths over and above those that would have occurred under competent leadership , such as that in Germany.
Space prevents a further discussion of similarities between Bush and Trump, but there is no question in my mind that Bush bent the curve in the Republican Party away from intelligence and a reasonably firm grasp of the details of policy. Now the question confronting the GOP is whether the curve will ever turn upward again. Bruce Bartlett is a longtime observer and commenter on economic and political affairs in Washington, D.
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