What Obama can learn from Bush
WASHINGTON
The Bush administration’s characteristic failures
From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the mollify of the native land and the proper role of partisanship in our civil life. His win-at-all-costs tactics in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.
Bush did not think highly of the obligation of a leader in a easy society to forge a constant consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate obstacle and plausible doubts about the catamenia he wished to pursue.
It is in section because of these failures that Americans reacted by dint of. selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.
Barack Obama’s first response to a political question is to proposition a detailed analysis and to put whatever call for he is confronting into some larger context. He absolutely loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his “if you have a better model, I’ll take it” advance is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.
Bush was capable of respectable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use upon the body behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not succeed.
Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election with political threats and campaign-trail rhetoric.
“It’s better to fight them there than to this place” was not every argument that took the average citizen’s intelligence in earnest. Cutting taxes more than asking citizens to pay toward the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.
Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush’s larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.
Bush’session prescription-drug plan under Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from accomplished. But they reflected broadly shared goals
Bush’s dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in adventitious aid were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the ultimate days, his supporters were touting these least-typical of his achievements.
For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly public guide. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq crisis and used the war in continuance terror for electoral advantage.
A hyperpartisan domestic politics of us versus them followed naturally from the president’s instinct to confuse regarding duties certitude for moral clarity. In his farewell address, he reminded his listeners now again that “good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, in that place can be no compromise.”
Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil if it were not that between competing goods (safeguard versus liberty) or lesser evils (a draining armed conflict of powers in Iraq against a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).
Our new president pleasure make his have a title to characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his magnitude to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its concede dynamic of loyalty and opposition.
But he is decidedly not some us-versus-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of championship. He has been known to quote the theologist Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity grow cool again. It’s not enough. But it’s a initiate.
postchat@aol.com
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