Second Thoughts on George Bush

A blog, like an e-mail, can be a dangerous vehicle for trying to get a message across. Almost by definition, entries are short and one has little time to establish a "tone of voice". Thus irony can be taken for sarcasm or cynicism, and gentle self-mockery for systematic self-disparagement or worse. These dangers are of course to some extent mitigated in the case of readers who do us the honour of reading our blogs regularly.

This rambling, Kaddafi-like preamble is a lead-in to a few remarks on George Bush, inspired by another truly excellent article by Ross Douthat in the IHT. Douthat pulls no punches on the legacy of the Bush presidency: "On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose."

But he goes on to say: "America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout."

I hope I will not be accused of sentimentalism (this is the rather tenuous connection with my opening paragraph) or of forgetting the terrible damage Bush wrought on the world, when I write that there is something almost unbearably touching about a president, his reputation in tatters and mocked by those who (like me) once applauded him, strove at the end to do the right thing. "And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him."