It's been half a decade since Bush Jr. left office. What are your thoughts on his presidency now?

[Futurist110]

Originally Posted by Darling3

Have your thoughts about Bush Jr.'s presidency changed in the last five years?

I don't think that they changed much over the last five years.

I still think that Bush Jr. screwed up in many areas (such as by invading Iraq before we were able to fully analyze the situation and all of our options there, by many of the deficits and debt increases which occurred under his watch, by not focusing enough on Afghanistan, et cetera). However, I do think that Bush gets much more criticism than he deserves for things such as his poor job creation record and for the 2008 financial crisis, since things such as this were not fully under his control.

[jobseeker2013]

Originally Posted by Futurist110

I don't think that they changed much over the last five years.

I still think that Bush Jr. screwed up in many areas (such as by invading Iraq before we were able to fully analyze the situation and all of our options there, by many of the deficits and debt increases which occurred under his watch, by not focusing enough on Afghanistan, et cetera). However, I do think that Bush gets much more criticism than he deserves for things such as his poor job creation record and for the 2008 financial crisis, since things such as this were not fully under his control.

I think the Bush Presidency forgot the lessons of history. Bush forgot the lessons on Vietnam and invaded Iraq without thinking it through nor developing and an exit strategy.

Your right on the economics, Clinton and Reagan deserve much of the blame as well.

There will be attempts to rehabilitate him like the many "history" books that have made the mediocre, if not poor Reagan Presidency seem great. What did Napoleon say: "history is a set of lies people have agreed upon"

[Knox Harrington]

Originally Posted by markg91359

This is a tough one, but I want to comment on it. I don't like George W. Bush, but I am going to try to be fair.

Bush's first actions in the aftermath of 9/11 were appropriate. I think any responsible leader would have pursued Al Quaeda to Afghanistan and would have overthrown the Taliban government that was assisting them. Bush did this and I think most of the country was behind him to that point.

However, there was no real justification though for the subsequent invasion of Iraq that ultimately cost this country $1 trillion or more. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Nor, was Iraq working on an atomic bomb. Bush may not have been responsible for the fact that the CIA's intelligence on Iraq was faulty. He was responsible for acting on bad intelligence. Some believe that invading Iraq was the only solution to Saddam Hussein. That was nonsense. Bill Clinton had totally neutralized Saddam Hussein by enforcement of a "No-fly zone" and periodic air and missile strikes that kept SH in line. No Americans were killed doing this and the cost of these measures was far, far less than the subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq would be. Bush took what was a difficult situation and made it infinitely worse. Whatever, the problems we had with SH, we have not been left with anything better in Iraq today. The Shiite Muslim majority that runs the country has close ties to our arch enemy, Iran. The country is a hotbed of political instability that did not exist when SH was dictator of the country. Our invasion and occupation probably cost 500,000 Iraqis their lives. This is more than the number of people SH murdered during his years in power. Any way this invasion of Iraq is viewed it comes up as a negative for the United States of America. We gained little in return for a lot and an elementary school child could have seen that our prospects of gaining anything real or substantive were small, at best.

Bush did try to reform Medicare by enacting the prescription drug benefit. This is a difficult issue. I personally believe that we might have been better off letting seniors try to find some other means to pay for their medications. Medicare paying for them drives the cost of these medications up. No provisions were put in place to limit the amount the pharmaceutical industry could charge for medicines, so the taxpayer ended up absorbing the cost and big Pharma ended up making big profits.

No President is responsible for a natural disaster. However, the poor way that relief from Hurricane Katrina was handled leaves me shaking my head. Bush had appointed Browne to be head of FEMA and his background for this job was that he had been a "horse breeder" before taking this office. This country is chock full of people with experience in handling emergencies and any one of those people would have been a far better appointment. Browne's appointment was the utter symbol of picking someone based on politics for an important job, rather than on competence.

Bush is not responsible for enacting most of the deregulation that occurred that lead to the financial crisis in 2008. However, he certainly didn't see it coming and never made any attempts to prevent it. Had he even shown some foresight and attempted any kind of reform, I might feel differently. As it is, I see Bush as a President utterly preoccupied with foreign policy and events in other parts of the world while the U.S. economy slowly came off the rails. He may not be responsible for what occurred, but he lacked the awareness or the vision to see what was happening and to try and do something about it. Great leaders have these kinds of abilities and Bush was not a great leader.

I will give Bush minor credit at the end of his Presidency for realizing that bailouts and loan guarantees were necessary to prevent failures of the banks and collapse of the auto industry. Many people in the GOP were so limited by notions they had about economics that they were unwilling to do what needed to be done to prevent a general economic collapse of the country. President Obama essentially built on these reform efforts after he took office.

In the end, George W. Bush did a great deal of harm to this country. His legacy is not a good one. Perhaps, future historians will cast him in a slightly better light. I think he is likely to be ranked among the 10 worst presidents in this country.

Just a note for other people who respond to this thread. This is about George W. Bush. If you begin your whole answer by saying "Well, Obama is worse" than you've missed the whole concept of the thread. Its here to talk about GWB.

This.

Thanks for saving me a lot of typing.

[Knox Harrington]

Originally Posted by NJGOAT

I think W was one of the first clear cut cases of separating the President, the individual, from the Presidency which includes all of those around him and the general policy.

People always seemd to like W, the person. This has become even more apparent after he has left office and he is probably more popular now then he ever was as President. He seems "genuine" and "normal" in a way most Presidents never do. Someone else said he was the "kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with" and that is very true. He has greatly reinforced this image by his desire to stay out of the spotlight and refusal to criticize the current President; openly stating that it is not the place of a former President to criticize the current guy.

However, his administration is a very different story. People elected W the moderate who didn't shy away from bipartisan compromise and what they got was an administration straight out of the neocon handbook. Much of that change of direction had to do with 9/11 and that single moment, while it would have changed any Presidency, had an even greater impact on W's.

The biggest weakness of W was his lack of foreign policy experience. This weakness was made up for, according to the campaign buttons, by placing Cheney on the ticket as VP. Cheney had the foreign policy credentials that W lacked and was tapped specifically to deal with those issues. This isn't very different from the reason Biden was picked to be Obama's VP. Of course, Cheney was a much more dominating personality than Biden is. Cheney was fine being paired with someone like HW Bush who was even more accomplished and informed on foreign policy. HW could hold Cheney's leash. W could not.

When 9/11 happened it was seen as the greatest threat to the country since WW2. In the Presidency we had someone whose greatest foreign policy achievement was serving, barely, in the Texas Air National Guard. However, his VP was the architect of the First Gulf War and practically written the book on neocon foreign policy. While W gave the speeches, Cheney was the one essentially calling the shots within the administration; as most of the administration was made up of former Reagan and HW Bush loyalists and think tankers. Even Colin Powell, who had served under Cheney in the Gulf War followed his lead. Thus, the moderate, bipartisan administration of W Bush morphed into the neocon paradise of Cheney.

W never recovered and what little social or domestic agenda he attempted was always over shadowed by the wars and that is where his administration spent its political capital. W was left as nothing more than the mouth piece for his party which was now fully run by the neocons. Unlike Clinton or HW Bush who led their parties and thus their administrations, W was left in the cold. He started to break through a bit in his second term and assert himself more, but the damage had long been done.

Absent 9/11 I think we would have seen a very different presidency under W. A different Republican in the White House such as McCain would have seen him able to far better manage the darker elements of the party owing to his own vast foreign policy and war experience. As it was, W became a sideshow in his own administration. He needs to take the blame for that and I think he will go down in history as a "decent man" but a "poor president".

Spot on. Great post and assessment.