Thursday, June 10, 2010
By Jacob M. Jordan
Former President George W. Bush has done a meticulous job of staying out of the limelight in the year and a half since the end of his presidency. Between scattered interviews and speeches, updates on a presidential library, and the penning of memoirs, the former commander-in-chief has pro-actively avoided anything close to a celebrity existence—he does not criticize the current administration or its policies, offer political commentary, or host SNL.
Invariably, when the Bush presidency pops up in conversation, everyone I talk to says the same thing: President George W. Bush is a good man. Everyone also prefaces their opinion with an acknowledgment of the former president's inarticulate side and his gaffes. The overarching feeling, however, is that President Bush possessed a genuinely solid character.
Now, as to the technicals of George W. Bush's administration, it was more of a mixed bag. President Bush's response to 9/11 obviously determined the trajectory of his presidency—and was itself composed of moments of visceral national unity, episodic controversies, political embarrassments, and triumph. If it had occurred in the last year of his final term, the capture of Osama bin Laden might have been the justifying capstone to the president's Middle East foreign policy. Overall, however, the President's performance in countering terrorism demonstrated an attitude of resolve and an emboldened sense of duty.
President Bush's handling of the economy, on the other hand, is not quite a mixed bag. In fact, it was awful. While the president did present a proposal to audit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Barnie Frank argued they were perfectly healthy), he also contributed to the doling out of mortgages to those who cannot pay them back, referring to down payments as a "barrier" to home ownership, and suggesting that taxpayer fund the provision of mortgages for those who cannot afford them. Now, don't get me wrong—this attitude did not begin with Bush, but it was perpetuated by him. Remember, housing is the sector from which all of our economic problems emerged.
The other major ding to the President's economic performance was his handling of the bank bailouts. While I do believe everyone in the room was genuinely scared when Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson described what the consequences of failing to bail out the big financials, it boggles my mind when I consider the fact that the president gave a former Goldman Sachs CEO a blank check, guaranteed by taxpayer money. Personally, I felt the egregiousness of this act was when President Bush said, "I abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." At least he respected us enough to not sugarcoat his reasoning.
In my opinion, there are two decisions President Bush made which will have consequences that prove far more significant than many of the other aspects of his presidency. Thankfully, they were good decisions. The first decision was his appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts, and the second was his appointment of Justice Samuel Alito. At a time when judicial activism threatens individual rights and constitutional values, the President installed two figures whose rulings on free speech and gun rights have offered hope to those who fear ever-expanding government. Indeed, these two appointments may end up being the best decisions President Bush made.
President Bush was by no means a perfect chief executive. I voted for the man twice, and at times found myself cringing, laughing, and ranting. While there were elements of cronyism, there were also instances in which the president demonstrated himself to be above such political favors (consider the lame-duck president's refusal to grant Scooter Libby a full pardon). In the end, however, President was a president who made the most important decisions on a moral basis and chose correctly.