Understanding Bush

Eight years ago he spoke very passionately about improving schools for children, wanted to fix Medicare and social security, was committed to cleaning up Washington, took great pride in his religion and promised a humble foreign policy that does not indulge in nation building. Now he is handing over the mantle to a much younger Barrack Obama who carries on his shoulder the hopes and dreams of an exhausted nation, that above all, fervently hopes that he completely erases and undoes the last eight years of his presidency.

His countrymen have called him a liar, an ego maniac, downright dumb, and a disgrace to the nation, the Europeans have called him an illiterate bible wielding Osama Bin Laden and the entire Islamic world is calling him a crusader. So how will history judge the 43’rd president?

Let us start off by acknowledging that right from the onset of the presidency George W. Bush got an extremely bad draw of the cards. He was sworn in when half of the country was angry and unwilling to accept him as the president due to the controversial Florida vote counting controversy. Then he inherited the internet bubble recession, then within seven months 9/11 occurred, then the corporate scandals, then Katrina, and to top it off, a year before he leaves he gets pummeled by a once in a century financial tsunami. If history is fair to him, it will surely recognize that he has been one of the unluckiest presidents in modern history.

Most people who know Bush personally think he is a through gentleman, affable, and charming, a religious man of great conviction, but also singularly incurious, unimaginative, stubborn and had an extraordinarily guttural animal quality about him. He was extremely ambitious; he wanted not only to be just a president, but to be one of the greatest presidents of all time, at a minimum better than his father and Bill Clinton. He wanted to be a leader of the free world who spreads his grand idea of democracy across the planet and in the bargain receive a direct pat on his back from Jesus.

During the 2000 presidential election; he was popular, articulate, decisive, knowledgeable about policy issues and intensely passionate about topics close to his heart. Even during the first term of the presidency, after 9/11 and during the initial years of the Iraq war he was still admired which resulted in him winning the re election bid. One can only conjecture, but somewhere between 2005 and 2006 he started getting disillusioned with his own achievements. He was running massive deficits, fighting two wars, was clueless about nation building, was seeing corruption scandals all around him, was forced to admit he was wrong about WMD’S in Iraq, and even though America had come out of recession, people just didn’t feel right about their financial future.

As the years rolled on, as the insurgency in Iraq grew, so did the public criticism. He slowly began to recognize that his presidency has been a complete failure, a shattered dream. He knew he was stuck in Iraq and couldn’t wiggle out of it. He had botched up his mandate and he had reached a point of no return. His unpopularity, mediocrity and fallibility hit him, and the constant barrage of snide comments on his IQ levels, smartness and speech making abilities didn’t help at all.

He started doubting his own judgment and with every passing year you could see him looking increasingly uneasy and uncomfortable in his own skin. He looked tired, jaded and increasingly nervous which he tried to make up through his overtly aggressive body language. If you were to compare the old pre-presidential public appearances and the ones from the past couple of years, the difference is striking.

I have no idea how history will judge bush, but if current consensus amongst historians is any indication, he will probably go down as one of the worst presidents that the United States has ever had. However before we anoint him with the ‘worst president’ title, we need to have a dispassionate dialogue, and that can happen only a decade or two from now, because the greatest defining moments of the Bush presidency, the wars against terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq have not yet been concluded.

Ironically one of the strongest things he has going for him is that most presidents lie and almost all them have taken this country to war. Kennedy, Bush Sr., Clinton, Nixon, Reagan, all of them lied and all of them took this country to war. George Bush is no different than the others and there is no reason we should treat him any differently.

If Iraq stays a democracy 20 years from now, if we see even a smattering of democracy in some of the other countries in the Middle East because of Iraq, if the current recession does not go down as a depression; history can afford to be kinder to George W. Bush.