Bush: The President Who Smoothed the Way for Obama

The Bush presidency saved the Republican Party first from a split only to plunge it later into disaster. George Walker Bush will be remembered mostly for making Barack Obama possible.

After eight years, his adversaries simply don’t put anything past him. George W. Bush’s presidency produced wartime pictures stamped with the words “Abu Ghraib” that will remain in our memories as symbols for the western world’s collective loss of honor. His references to the “axis of evil” and “rogue states” have largely become, even if unfairly, variations of conventional wisdom. It’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He departs in the midst of an ominous economic drumbeat pounding in the world’s ears.

Finally, a book appeared at the end of the year that purports to connect Bush’s family with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The author – avoiding polemics, but fixated on his thesis – now sees his book on best-seller lists. Such is the atmosphere in which a highly gifted conqueror of political majorities leaves the White House.

That was once George Walker Bush – a gifted fighter who delighted the Republicans with one record after another up to 2004. His first term appeared to be the dawn of a new decade of Republican majorities. His second term ended in disaster. Without Bush’s early successes in which his positive character traits played a role, the caution – one might even say the fearful submissiveness – displayed by those opposed to the Iraq war – would be incomprehensible. Without his negative traits he wouldn’t have failed in his second term. Inspired by success and prone to fits of temper, Bush became desensitized to criticism. That developed into hubris, and the end was then inevitable.

His greatest historic achievement may seem perplexing: he saved the Republican party from a split at a critical time. Bush took the helm of his party in 2000 when it was in far worse shape than Germany’s Social Democrats are today. A conservative Christian movement active mostly in the American south had become a political powerhouse. It was by no means just a simple conglomerate of individual churchgoers, but an embryonic political movement with one leg inside the Republican Party and one outside it. The movement had historic weight. It was rooted in the South’s resentment of Washington ever since the Civil War, given legs by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s critics, fired up over the protests of the young and financed by billions of dollars in conservative money; it grew to several million members. Had the Republican Party split, they would no longer have had clear majorities in many of the 50 states nor in Congress. The impact of that on governing the nation should not be underestimated.

Despite his ostentatious overtures to them, Bush wasn’t the conservative Christians’ choice for President in 2000. They distrusted him and Bush came close to defeat in that election. His analysis was simple. The evangelicals had to be kept in place, but controlled.

Bush extended a friendly hand to them. When asked whether he had consulted his father, the former president, before going to war with Iraq, replied, “There is a higher Father that I appeal to.” The answer was tailored to the evangelicals. Why did he call his education reform program “No Child Left Behind?” He named it for a popular novel in an evangelical fiction series. He supported the conservative wing by forbidding the use of embryonic stem cells for research purposes (but not the use of adult stem cells or research by private organizations). He courted the conservative wing by supporting a pro-forma ban on gay marriage – he, who just one day before the 2004 election said, “It makes no difference to me how people choose to live together,” and who wrote to a former classmate who had undergone sex-change surgery, “Finally, you can be yourself.”

The calculation paid off. The evangelicals voted for Bush in droves in the 2000 and 2004 elections and the moderates didn’t jump ship. Democrats understood full well how successfully Bush had tamed the tiger. Democrats had become powerful in the South in 1876 as an anti-Lincoln party. Southern Democrats remained the part’s mainstay for a century and even John F. Kennedy owed his election to southern racists. Kennedy overcame that, but approached civil rights for blacks very cautiously. Forty years later, it appeared Bush was transforming the South into a Republican bastion. The evangelicals weren’t racist and that made Bush even more dangerous for the Democrats. In Congress they voted for the Iraq war and the anti-terror laws while keeping an eye on the South.

September 11th, 2001, gave Bush legitimacy far into the ranks of the opposition. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s onetime security advisor wrote of Iraq in 2007, “Without a psychological connection to 9/11 and the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction, this wanton war would have never achieved support in Congress.” In 2001, however, he maintained “The explosive character of the Middle East powder keg plus the fact that Iran possesses both the motive and the means to provide assistance to the terrorist underground should not be ignored in favor of legalistic arguments of ‘lack of evidence’ in the case of Iraq’s complicity in the events of September 11th.”

Not everyone shared Brzezinski’s position, but there were enough of them to break the opposition. In a wave of authentic, often exaggerated patriotic sentiment, skepticism was politically risky. After Bush’s election victory, Obama admitted he had had second thoughts about his 2002 anti-war speech before all the historic evidence was in.

The “spokesperson” for war in Iraq came from a different quarter, namely the neo-conservatives who rose to power with Bush’s election. They were often former Democrats and often Jewish. Germans have to be careful in criticizing them because the prevailing worldview was a reaction to Hitler. Never had the occupation of the Rhineland, the treaty of Munich or Auschwitz been such popular topics of conversation as they were among neo-cons in reference to Saddam. They increased their audience after September 11th. That day will influence the United States for generations. Bush expressed his opinion that Saddam had been at war with the United States since 1990 and had been the aggressor in 2001 and thus couldn’t be allowed to prevail. But he circumvented evangelical pressure for a cultural war with Islam. Instead, Bush began secret negotiations with American Islamic leaders that culminated in a Fatwah against terrorism. That was his most unrecognized success.

The war provided him with cover. Saddam’s fall certainly helped avoid a future nuclear arms race between Iraq and Iran, but Osama bin Laden escaped capture by the Americans in December 2001 because American troops had been redployed to Iraq. Bush halted Saddam’s slaughter of Shi’ites, but Abu Ghraib undermined the West. The repulsive pictures taken there had a dramatic and lasting effect on Europe’s many Muslim residents. Bush begged forgiveness from the Islamic world, but not from Europe. He refused to hold any military commander or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld accountable for Abu Ghraib. That was a serious error.

The winner of the 2004 election began to show signs of obstinacy. That quickly developed into hubris. After his re-election, he wanted to achieve everything at once – not least as a diversion from Abu Ghraib – peace in Iraq, solution to the Middle East problem, social and immigration reform. On the latter issue, differences between moderates and conservatives in Bush’s party caused everything to grind to a halt. Bush’s greatest triumph, capturing nearly every southern seat in Congress, had destroyed the balance of power within the party. Moderate Republicans felt threatened and evangelicals could hardly go against such power. Both groups began attacking one another and Bush was distracted by Iraq. He became President of a nation divided by Iraq just as Lyndon Johnson did with America during Vietnam. Hurricane Katrina became a symbol for his administration although the chaos ended up largely on state Democrats’ desks (the state today is securely in Republican hands).

Bush’s second term became four lost years. The embarrassment of Bush’s failed “jokes” at the annual Washington Press Corps dinner have only become more depressing with the passage of time. The budget deficit has risen to over a trillion dollars. Bill Clinton’s budget “surplus” is the legend of shadow budgets, dangerous interest rate policies and kidnapped investments. When Clinton left office, the FBI had no computers capable of sending email. Bush remedied that. His other accomplishments – modernized labor rights, India as a strategic partner, the political encirclement of North Korea, massive aid to Africa, education reform, halting the smuggling of nuclear secrets from Pakistan, and, not least, the thwarting of other terrorist attacks on the United States – all nonetheless pale in comparison to the economic collapse, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These are the closing credits of “The Bush Years.”

“We screwed everything up,” wrote a right-wing pundit in his assessment of the Bush years. His was a complaint of a far too lackadaisical president whom they correctly distrusted already in the year 2000. Bush used and simultaneously sabotaged the conservatives. In translation, that means George W. Bush thwarted a religiously radical movement that wasn’t fully, but at least partially, fundamentalist in nature. That movement’s fermenting resentment would have destroyed America’s equilibrium. Bush didn’t create the movement, he encountered it and used its desire for power while recognizing its partial successes, took it into his second term, and due to poor planning and encumbered with debts to the point of being ridiculous finally managed to destroy it.

It may be that America will find its way back to the middle ground. Perhaps George W. Bush was precisely the one who made a President Barack Obama possible. He’ll surely want to see it that way from his Dallas retirement home.