George W. Bush: A tale of two terms

George W. Bush will not officially relinquish office until 20 January 2009 when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, but on 5 November 2008 his opinion largely ceased to matter. Bush’s main short-term concern is to help engender a smooth transition to the new president. His longer-term concern is more problematic and revolves around his place in history – an issue that obsesses all ex-presidents, left with only their reputations to nurture.

Bush has good reason to be fearful. Opinion polls suggest he is the second most unpopular president in history. Gallup records that an average of less than 30 per cent of Americans approves of the job he’s doing during his 31st quarter in office (20 July-19 Oct), well below the 51 per cent average 31st quarter ratings for other second-term presidents. Bush’s job approval ratings actually declined to 25 per cent in two early October 2008 Gallup polls, only one point above Richard Nixon at his post-Watergate nadir and three points higher than the all-time low for any president since Gallup began polling. That dishonourable distinction belongs to Harry Truman, who bottomed out at 22 per cent in 1952. Bush’s overall second-term job approval rating is 37 percent, well below average. Democrats are almost wholly negative about Bush’s performance and only one in two Republicans are positive.

Given widespread dissatisfaction with his performance, it is not surprising that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, distanced himself from Bush at every opportunity on the campaign trail and that the president’s appearance at the GOP’s September convention was cancelled. Obama, in contrast, sought to tie McCain to the unpopular Bush, to paint him as a facsimile of the failed incumbent. Obama’s own message of change played on dissatisfaction with the Bush regime. “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago,” responded an exasperated McCain during the third and final presidential debate.

It is not hard to figure the sources of Bush’s unpopularity. While the United States military quickly crushed Iraqi forces in 2003, it has failed to keep the peace. Thousands of American soldiers, and more Iraqis, have lost their lives, but the neo-conservatives’ nation-building and democratisation plans are in tatters. Saddam is dead; but the new government cannot govern in the face of militant insurgents, the region is more unstable and Iran grows in influence by the week. The dire consequences of the decision to invade are made worse by the heavy-handed nature of its execution without UN approval and by the failure to uncover WMD, the key rationale for invention. Whatever the merits and demerits of the surge, most experts and laypersons agree that the war has been badly bungled. The situation is little better in Afghanistan. Vietnam is remembered as Lyndon Johnson’s war; Iraq will likely be Bush’s Vietnam.

In addition to military mistakes, the war on terror has been accompanied by an encroachment of executive power over the other branches of government and the legally questionable treatment of “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo Bay. Equally controversial is the question of domestic spying without judicial review. Cheney and others claim the constitution grants such powers to a president and it is certainly the case that previous presidents have taken exceptional actions during times of crisis or war. Abraham Lincoln for example partly suspended habeas corpus during the civil war, on the grounds that it necessary to violate a small part of the constitution to save the whole, and ignored Taney-led Supreme Court decisions demanding its restoration. Taney, of course, authored the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 that ruled black persons could not be citizens, precipitating the civil war. Lincoln was in no mood to execute his decisions.

At home, two further catastrophes rocked the Bush administration. It is difficult to overstate the shock Americans felt on witnessing the destruction wrought on Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Even more shocking was the apparent indifference of Bush’s federal authorities to the submergence of much of New Orleans under floodwater after the levees broke. Indifference was replaced by incompetence in the form of FEMA (the federal emergency management agency) under the leadership of Michael Brown, appointed by a Bush crony despite having no experience in disaster relief. Nearly 2,000 people died, largely African American, mainly drowned, and about $100 billion of damage done. “Brownie,” crowed Bush in spite of all evidence to the contrary, “you’re doing a heck of a job.” Rap artist Kanye West caught the mood better at a charity gig, saying simply: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

The second catastrophe was economic. The global economic crisis of late 2008 has its roots in the lending patterns of American financial institutions who on the back of rising house prices loaned money to high-risk borrowers. When these so-called sub-prime mortgages’ attractive, low introductory repayments where replaced by higher interest rates, the loans quickly became toxic as borrowers defaulted. Many banks both in the US and abroad, who had also bought into the market directly or via derivatives, were forced to write off billions of dollars in bad loans and some collapsed. The crisis worsened, however, in September when America’s fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly banks stopped lending to each other, fearful that they would lose their money, liquidity dried up and the financial system stopped functioning.

It is difficult to argue that the credit crunch is a direct consequence of any specific decision or action of the Bush administration. Critics argue, however, that the Republicans’ laissez-faire approach to economic management generally and in particular its failure to regulate the over-heated and -exposed sub-prime market facilitated the current crisis. Bush has also been criticised for slashing taxes and increasing public spending, housekeeping that has resulted in huge budget deficits and a doubling of the national debt to more than $10 trillion.

In response to the financial maelstrom, Bush was forced to abandon his economic orthodoxy and instead offer a big-government solution in the form of a $700 billion bailout of America’s biggest financial institutions. The government would buy up the bad loans, free up liquidity and restore confidence. After an earlier defeat of the bailout by his own party in the House of Representatives—another tick in the ‘failed presidency’ column—Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson finally won congressional approval on 3 October, but it did not stop a further large fall in the stock market.

The government was now behind the curve; liquidity replaced toxic loans as the main problem, but the bailout offered no direct solution to the former. Led by the UK, European governments instead injected capital directly into ailing institutions by buying an equity stake. The US government soon followed suit, despite Secretary Paulson admitting re-capitalisation was “objectionable.” That the Bush administration should fizzle out with the reversal of its key ideological principle in the form of the largest government intervention in the US economy since the Great Depression is an unhappy irony.

It is remarkable how quickly the Bush presidency unravelled. It is difficult to argue contrary to the failure hypothesis, but it is important to make a distinction between Bush’s first and second terms. To be sure, Bush’s tenure began in inauspicious circumstances. He lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore and required five Republican Supreme Court justices to award him Florida’s electoral college votes and thus the presidency. The disrupted transition period and jibes about stealing the election did not, however, prevent Bush and his team—constituted of experienced Washington insiders (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Card) and Texas loyalists (Rove, Hughes)—hitting the ground running and clocking up an impressive list of legislative and other achievements.

It is always problematic to make objective judgements about incumbent presidents – especially one as polarising and controversial as Bush. Moreover, historical perspective is required to make sense of some decisions and to see how others play out. There is also the question of which criteria and methods should used to measure success: approval ratings, comparisons with other presidents in similar historical circumstances, a list of legislative achievements and failures, or some or all of these? There is clearly no definitive answer to the criteria question, but to avoid subjectively distorting the analysis, one useful measure is to see if Bush met his own goals. We would argue he largely did during his first term, and this is made more impressive because American presidents are institutionally weak, especially in domestic affairs, and because the manner of this election provided very little political capital to bolster his prospects.

Six months into his first term, Bush persuaded Congress to approve the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which included the largest tax cut in American history, estimated by economists at between $1.3 and $1.6 trillion. It provided a tax rebate of about $300 per person and cut income, capital gains and estate taxes, especially on the rich. The cuts were trailed during the election campaign as necessary to give hardworking and overtaxed Americans a break during economic good times.

When the economy turned sour during the first months of his presidency, the justification audaciously changed; it was resold as a boost to hard-up families and to help consumers spend the country out of trouble. Bush had further legislative success in 2003 when Congress passed the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, which further reduced taxes on unearned income, including dividends and capital gains – again,overwhelmingly benefiting the rich. The first tax cut in particular is a remarkable political achievement given Bush’s lack of political capital and his razor-thin majority in the Senate, where a few recalcitrant members can easily filibuster legislation. Ronald Reagan passed a smaller tax cut during his first year in office, for which he is still revered by conservatives.

When the dust settles and conservatives analyse soberly the Bush years, the current incumbent may join Reagan in conservative heaven – although hardliners generally do not approve of a Bush’s next legislative success, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which fundamentally restructured the delivery and organisation of school education in the United States. It increased substantially the role and power of the federal government over education, traditionally the responsibility of the individual states.

NCLB is fundamentally Blairite in ideology. Among other things, it set strict achievement targets for pupils and schools across a wide range of indicators and imposed strict sanctions on teachers and schools that failed to meet them (including sacking and closure). There is no consensus among educationalists on the extent of the act’s success, but it is important to note that it was a clear legislative victory for Bush, more so because it received congressional approval before 9/11 (although it was not signed into law until January 2002). More awkwardly for Bush, NCLB is an example of the big-government interventionism that he and conservatives profess to detest.

Bush also reduced the cost of elderly and disabled Americans’ prescription drugs, via the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 – but at great cost to the taxpayer, and again to the chagrin of some fiscal conservatives who bridle at estimates suggesting the programme could cost more than one trillion dollars over ten years. Finally, Bush was able to tip the Supreme Court to the right with the appointment of two justices—albeit after the embarrassing Harriet Miers’ debacle, a Bush loyalist whom the Senate’s social conservatives viewed as not conservative enough—and was very successful packing the lower federal judiciary with like-minded ideologues.

Aaron Wildavsky, a great American political scientist, argued that there are “two presidencies.” Presidents are powerful in foreign affairs, but are institutionally weak in domestic affairs, even under ‘unified government’ where their party holds a congressional majority. Weak parties, strong interest groups, a separation of powers and checks and balances mitigate against strong executive leadership or indeed any sort of leadership. The founding fathers, concerned about tyranny, designed the system to be deliberative, slow, inefficient even. While tax cuts, education and Medicare reform and a strengthening of conservatives’ grip on the federal judiciary may not, to an European observer, seem a particularly impressive list of achievements, they in fact represent a very good return for President Bush’s first term, and more so when the political context, especially pre-9/11, is considered.

Crises help centralise power in the executive over the legislature and the central government over the state and local governments, and Bush certainly benefited from this dynamic post 9/11. His approval ratings rose dramatically and he used his new-found popularity to retaliate quickly in Afghanistan, reorganise the federal government security apparatus and win domestic approval for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. As a war president, he invoked patriotism and continuity to overcome a strong challenge from Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in November 2004 and enhance the Republican Party’s majorities in both House and Senate; but Iraq was also Bush’s biggest mistake, and the catalyst for many second-term failures.

Given the constraints noted by Wildavsky, very few presidents are able to leave a significant mark on the American political system. Those great presidents that do, such as Lincoln and FDR, are according to historian Stephen Skowronek “reconstructive.” Only rarely is the American system amenable to such change, but the opportunity usually arises during times of great crisis or flux. The apparent tragedy for Bush is that 9/11 offered him the opportunity to restructure the presidential branch and reframe the political system in his own image for decades to come, but he chose to wage a possibly illegitimate and seemingly un-winnable war that curtailed future choices and reforms.

One such example is immigration reform. Bush and his political svengali Karl Rove figured they could build a long-term Republican majority by winning over the large, quickly growing, Democratic-leaning Latino population. Rove always argued that the Republican Party, with its pro-family policies should be the natural home of hardworking, socially conservative Latinos, but that they were alienated by the party’s restrictionist, anti-immigration image in the 1990s. To redress it and leave a formidable electoral legacy, Bush proposed in his second term to legalise the status of, and offer a “path to citizenship,” for over ten million undocumented immigrants, mainly Latinos. The ambitious plan failed, but it would have stood a much greater chance of success had Bush been a popular, powerful political force. A potentially significant legacy was doomed by his earlier actions and decisions.

Indeed, Bush’s failure to rise to the challenge of history offers an opportunity for the president-elect. Obama, who faces the most difficult economic and international conditions of any incoming president since FDR in 1933, could possibly reconstruct politics and society, but he must make wiser choices than his predecessor.

We must remember, however, that legacies can take years to reveal themselves. Barry Goldwater, humiliated by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential contest, is now widely acclaimed as the father of modern conservatism and Jimmy Carter has seen his stock rise as history allows us to better contextualise his presidency. Most notable, perhaps, is Harry Truman, one of two presidents rated worse than Bush by the American people, but who many historians now place as a near-great chief executive.

Bush’s legacy rests on events in the Middle East. If Iraq is able somehow to democratise successfully, it may help engender a wider regional rush to democracy, bringing peace and stability and undermining radical influences. Our best guess is that this is very unlikely, but history may judge otherwise. Bush must hope so, because his first-term successes are currently forgotten, buried deep below his second-term failures.