Legal Commentary

How Bad a President is George W. Bush? Maybe not That Bad?

By Jack M. Balkin

George W. Bush is not popular. He has seemingly cemented himself as a symbol of failure and ineptitude. To some, he is the modern face of evil. His Administration is seen, especially on the left, as an utter and complete disaster. The editors of the New Yorker claim that his presidency is ?arguably the worst in history.? Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, in a recent cover-story in Rolling Stone, claims that Bush was not only a disaster himself, to his administration, to America, and to the world (he said all of that in an earlier Rolling Stone article), but also to the Republican Party and its hope for future electoral success. Even John McCain has proclaimed, in his acceptance speech to follow Bush as the Republican Party presidential nominee, ?we need to change the way the government does almost everything.?

I?m certainly not here to praise Bush, but enough others are doing the burying that I want to raise some questions about how we understand presidential power, what constitutes a successful presidential administration, and how George W. might be thought about as the years pass and we look back at his presidency with more time and healing. And in doing so, I hope to have a point that goes beyond academic/blogging self-indulgence. I think seeing Bush as a president of some achievement suggests a potential way to govern for Barack Obama or whoever is to become the next Democratic president.

Bush doesn?t represent the first Republican president or man of power that Democrats have cursed as the worst. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, George H.W. Bush, (and now Sarah Palin?) have all been labeled by the left as unintelligent bores who mess everything up. Emotionally, I don?t disagree with this narrative. But intellectually, our efforts at slandering right-wingers of power as nothing more than inept buffoons leads us to miss the simultaneous and successful grabs for power by these men on the right. Dan Quayle was a perfect example of this. He was Sarah Palin while she was still reporting basketball scores on local television. Who can forget the deer-in-the-headlight look on Quayle?s face when Lloyd Bentsen told him he was ?no Jack Kennedy.? (If you forgot, youtube it). Quayle was always screwing up?misspelling potato, saying he opposed the right to an abortion while respecting his daughter?s own choice in the matter, saying Murphy Brown (a popular television character in the early ?90s) was a bad representation of a mother because she didn?t have a husband around to help. We yelled, we cursed, and had we had the Daily Show around then, we would have laughed. All the while the Republicans deftly deflected attention from issues they were in trouble on. Quayle?s comments on Murphy Brown (May 19, 1992), came right after the L.A. riots (April 29, 1992). We all laughed at Quayle; we all forgot about South-Central L.A and how we wanted to end poverty.

George W. Bush is at the end of eight years that few of us will forget. He was elected with the help of five Republican-nominated justices on the Supreme Court, without a national majority of voters, and (arguably) without a majority of the Electoral College. He led us into Vietnam II, a war whose support was fed by lies, manipulations, and misinformation. The U.S. standing as a world and humanitarian power has sunk with allegations of human rights abuses by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanimo. The economy is tanking, and Bush?s approval ratings have been the lowest in history.

But in dismissing Bush?s success as a president, are we missing something? I want to answer this question in two ways. First, I want to argue that?as with the example of Dan Quayle?we have focused so much on Bush?s public bumbling that we have missed many of the major ?accomplishments? of his administration. Second, I?d like to argue that given the place he was in January 2001?a position he entered into that was no fault of his own presidency?he?s done not so badly for himself.

To make both of these arguments, we need to be in his shoes. George W. Bush never wanted to be the president who created the New Deal or the Great Society. He wanted to extend the Reagan legacy; he wanted to further efforts of scaling back the programs of the New Deal and Great Society. He wanted to lower taxes, get government out of people?s lives, and allow local communities to promote their own cultural, moral, and religious ideas. Bush was never ready to lead a revolution, but he had some big proposals. Did he achieve any of them? An initial glance shows that he had a fair amount of success. He won massive tax cuts and has maintained those cuts even in a bad economy and with a Democratic Congress pushing for change. He and his administration often made whole-scale cuts to a variety of government programs, rewriting regulations on environmental protection, labor law, health and services, and a variety of social issues. He passed a contested program ?No Child Left Behind? that liberals call a failure, but that certainly fits with Bush?s ideology and goals. For all the lawyers and law professors reading this blog, Bush talked repeatedly about tort reform in his campaigns, and he signed the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, quite arguably the biggest piece of tort reform legislation enacted. (As an aside for those of you muttering how bad that legislation was for public interest litigation?McCain voted against it; Obama, for it).

His biggest failure? One might say Iraq or the economy. I?d guess he?d say Social Security reform. When you go back to his agenda-defining speeches in 2000 and early 2001, Social Security is the big issue that he failed to accomplish. Iraq was a disaster in many ways. Many, many ways. It continues to be, and the political, economic, and symbolic wreckage will outlive his presidency, probably by at least a decade. But I?d guess Bush is more upset with failed details in the direct aftermath of Saddam Hussein?s removal than with the overall game plan and outcome. From his perspective, Iraq is a work in progress with a dictator removed. Did it make America safer? Probably not. But there hasn?t been a terrorist attack since 9/11 on American soil. As for the economy, I?m sure he sees the downturn as something that is as much a product of things outside of his control than his own mistakes?and is he totally wrong? Was Bill Clinton the reason the stock market soared in the ?90s on the back of Silicon Valley? Maybe Al Gore, but not Bill Clinton.

As to the second argument, that Bush?s success/failure needs to be evaluated within the context of when he took office in 2001, lets begin with what we know. Bush began his presidency by joining Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison as the only presidents to win the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. The Hayes election is the most apt comparison because, like Bush in 2000, Hayes? success in the Electoral College was based on disputed votes involving fraud, intimidation, and manipulation. Like Bush, Hayes was a Republican elected within two decades after a very popular member of the party (Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan). Unlike Bush, Hayes backed away from a lot of Lincoln?s legacy (most notably civil rights) in the face of intense opposition. In his book, The Politics Presidents Make (Harvard University Press, 1997), Stephen Skowronek argues that presidential power must be understood in the context of political regimes. Presidents don?t define their job starting the first day in office?most of it has already been defined for them by the presidents who directly preceed them. The best way to be a great president is to follow a president from the opposing party who was perceived as an utter failure. Franklin Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover; Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter. Both FDR and Reagan entered office with ample warrants for change?the public wanted them to do something different, something new. That?s not George W. Bush. Like his dad, George W. followed in the mystique of Ronald Reagan. His goal was to maintain, to ?articulate? the Reagan legacy. But, as Skowronek argues, over time this gets harder and harder to do. New issues come up, and the old, despondent opposition revitalizes itself.

Historically, most of these ?articulation? presidents have been seen as mediocre at best to failures at worst. Which side of this mediocre/failure is Bush on? Given how he entered office, my guess is that the hopes of Bush and his leading administrators were not to push for another revolution. My guess is they were coming to realize that there weren?t many years left by which Republicans could achieve the unfulfilled goals of the Reagan revolution. With the exception of Social Security, Bush did a pretty good at pushing through some of these unfulfilled goals. Most broadly, he has secured the fact that corporate America is the dominant interest in politics today. Ask Barack Obama; he certainly doesn?t seem to want to challenge that notion.

Any evaluation of presidential success/failure will change with new eras, perspectives, and with new historians. There is a recent historical revisionism regarding the presidency of Andrew Johnson, as there has been with regards to Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Jimmy Carter. My suspicion is something similar will happen for George W. It follows my suspicion that Republicans don?t see this Administration as the abject failure that Democrats do. And I think Democrats have something to learn from this if it is true. Bush pushed democracy, pushed the constitutional powers of his office, and pushed conservative ideology to its limits, with some success and some notable failures. I?m still waiting for a Democrat who will try and do the same.

Full post as published by Balkinization on September 18, 2008 (boomark / email).