This article was originally published by William L. Anderson at The Mises Institute.
In a recent New York Times column, David French, in one of his usual anti-Trump screeds, created a hagiographic picture of the presidency of George W. Bush, comparing him to Donald Trump’s current term of office. Wrote French:
Bush was interventionist; Trump is far more isolationist. Bush expanded the social safety net with Medicare Part D; Trump cut Medicaid. Bush implemented PEPFAR, the successful program to combat AIDS in Africa that has saved more than 20 million lives; Trump has gutted PEPFAR. While both men nominated pro-life judges (a Bush appointee, Justice Samuel Alito, wrote the Dobbs decision), Trump ran on a watered-down platform that removed traditional Republican support for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution that would effectively outlaw abortion.
Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how one would describe Trump.
Indeed, the Trump presidency has so unnerved his opposition to the point where many of his former opponents have praised him, contrasting his so-called unifying presidency as opposed to the Trump White House, which has created division:
Bush’s video was part of “The Call to Unite,” a 24-hour livestream featuring Oprah Winfrey, Sean Combs, Bill Clinton, and a host of other celebrities. Clinton’s message struck similar notes: “We need each other, and we do better when we work together,” he said. “That’s never been more clear to me as I have seen the courage and dignity of the first responders, the health care workers, all the people who are helping them to provide our food, our transportation, our basic services to the other essential workers.”
The message is clear: whether one agrees with everything about the Bush presidency, at least Bush is a decent, Christian guy (not like Trump) and is a humanitarian to boot. Although the political rhetoric from Democrats during the administration of POTUS 43 was anything but unifying, it seems that all is forgiven as Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans join to fight Trump.
Although some may be nostalgic for Bush, perhaps we should be reminded of his disastrous record as president, a record that still is creating negative dividends to this very day. Forget the rhetoric about how “this guy is decent.” The term “decent” is no way to describe Bush’s two terms in office.
The “Illegitimate” President
Long before Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans claimed that Russian tampering with the wheels of Democracy gave the 2016 election to Trump, Democrats accused Bush of stealing the 2000 election against Vice President Al Gore. Indeed, like the Trump-Hillary Clinton election in 2016, the Democratic candidates received more total votes, but Bush and Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, prompting Democrats to call for an end to the Electoral College system altogether.
For all the nostalgia for Bush, one should not forget that the Democrats openly claimed his presidency was illegitimate, given that the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, squashed a statewide recount in Florida that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. When Bush took office, Republicans briefly held both houses of Congress until Republican Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont later that year left the party and caucused with the Democrats, giving them control of the Senate until early 2003.
The 9/11 Attacks and Permanent Warfare…On Everyone
As the nation moved into a recession early in 2001, the Bush presidency was seen as foundering. However, when terrorist attacks took down the World Trade Towers in New York and crashed a plane into the Pentagon on September 11 of that year, Bush’s presidential fortunes changed greatly. Like they did with Bill Clinton after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the public rallied around President Bush even though it would become clear that, at the very best, the 9/11 attacks were the result of a major intelligence failure.
The government immediately blamed al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, for the attacks and demanded that the Taliban government of Afghanistan turn him over to US authorities (it was believed bin Laden was hiding in that country). When the Taliban failed to meet the demand, US armed forces invaded the country, quickly pushing the government out of Afghanistan and seemingly winning an easy—and very brief—war. That the war would continue for another 22 years before the US Armed Forces had yet another ignominious exit from a humiliating conflict was not obvious when Bush first ordered the invasion.
But Bush was only beginning his military response to the 9/11 attacks. Throughout 2002 and early in 2003, his administration made multiple claims that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, was seeking to build “weapons of mass destruction.” Even though Iraq cooperated with UN weapons inspectors, the Bush administration ramped up the anti-Saddam rhetoric throughout 2002, and by March 2003, it was clear that President Bush intended to go to war.
Like the Afghanistan invasion, the Iraq war at first went easily for American troops who seemingly won a quick and convincing victory, with US forces arresting or killing many in that country’s political leadership, and capturing Saddam himself, who was later hanged. However, the US fortunes turned soon afterward, and the war became a long slog, a drawn-out affair with insurgents not only from Iraq but also other Islamic countries where the US invasion angered the populations there.
The Iraq war continued throughout Bush’s administration, well past his re-election in 2004, and once the voting public realized there would be no real victory, Republican electoral fortunes went south, and in the 2006 elections, Democrats won both the Senate and the House of Representatives by wide margins.
But the Bush administration was not just at war with Afghanistan, Iraq, and whomever else might be classified as a “terrorist,” but it also went to war with the general public. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Congress—pressured by the White House—passed the infamous Patriot Act that ramped up domestic spying and vastly expanded the so-called terrorism statutes. When Attorney General John Ashcroft was questioned in Congress, he bemoaned the resistance to the huge expansion of government spying power, claiming he was just keeping America “safe.”
Supposedly to make air travel safer in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration created the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), which became effective in making air travel even worse but not really improving air safety. James Bovard became a highly-visible critic of the TSA, highlighting the follies of an agency whose employees were given a lot of authority—and used it poorly.
Don’t Forget the Housing Bubble
But what would an examination of the George W. Bush administration be without mentioning the infamous housing bubble which gave the nation a major financial crisis that sent the economy off into the deepest recession since the end of World War II? With the economy seemingly dead in the water, the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates in 2003 to one percent.
Bush was able to push a cut in income tax rates through Congress, lowering the top rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. At the same time, his administration ramped up spending in all areas from the armed forces to the welfare state—and the federal deficits and the national debt soared. If ever there was a so-called Keynesian recovery, it would have been via the Bush presidency.
Not only did the government do what it could to lower mortgage rates, but it also pushed other policies aimed at placing minorities and people with questionable credit into home ownership, setting off the infamous Housing Bubble, which peaked in late 2006 and resulted in a massive financial crash that by September 2008 had engulfed much of Wall Street and the nation’s financial sector.
Bush Centralizes Education
Apparently, George H.W. Bush was not the only Bush who wanted to be the “Education President.” His son gave the nation the No Child Left Behind Act, which centralized much of the nation’s public education systems, completing the job that Jimmy Carter had begun when his administration created the US Department of Education.
Not surprisingly, the No Child Left Behind Act did not improve the educational performance of the nation’s schoolchildren. However, it did empower education bureaucrats and further pushed education policy into the hands of the teachers’ unions, guaranteeing that things would even get worse in the future.
Conclusion
George W. Bush backed into the presidency, helped by a favorable Supreme Court decision. When he left office eight years later, he had managed to leave a legacy that still is paying negative dividends.
His wars caused death and destruction, created millions of new enemies of the United States, and caused a refugee crisis that has never gone away, destabilizing not only the Middle East but also Europe. He created one of the worst financial crises in the nation’s history, moving the economy from the collapse of the Dot.Com Bubble at the end of the Clinton administration to the collapse of the Housing Bubble in 2008. His domestic spying policies eroded many of our liberties, some of which have probably been lost forever.
It is hard to believe that one president could do that much damage in eight years, but apparently, Bush was up to the task. Modern pundits like David French may do their best to rehabilitate him, but there is no rehabilitation for the death and destruction that followed this man’s presidency.
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