Adrian Wooldridge Is... the Vicar of Bray!
"The Illustrious House of Hannover,
And Protestant succession,
To these I lustily will swear,
Whilst they can keep possession:
For in my Faith, and Loyalty,
I never once will faulter,
But George, my lawful king shall be,
Except the Times shou'd alter."
Adrian Wooldridge, October 27, 2004:
(with John Micklethwait): [Bush's] presidency has been momentous--two terms rolled into one, by any decent reckoning. He has not only transformed American policy. He has also transformed American conservatism. Mr. Bush's critics like to accuse him of taking partisanship to new depths.... An exaggeration, perhaps. But there is no doubt that he has taken the old injunction about "dancing with the one that brung you" to heart. No Republican president has devoted so much attention to this "right nation" within America.... The past four years have arguably brought more dramatic changes to conservative America than to America as a whole....
The most surprising change has been the rise of "big government conservatism.".... The massive growth in the state during this presidency... is a deliberate strategy. He came to office planning to expand the Department of Education.... Before Mr. Bush, conservatives had assumed that the only way to win the battle against what Michael Barone has dubbed "soft America" was to shrink government. Mr. Bush has pioneered a different strategy--to "harden" government itself.
Mr. Bush... has shifted power dramatically in favor of social conservatives.... A quarter of voters are born-again Christians--and Karl Rove blames his boss's failure to win a resounding victory in 2000 on the failure of four million of these voters to turn up at the polls....
Mr. Bush's boldest contribution to reinventing conservatism--foreign policy.... Mr. Bush's battle against "the axis of evil" is a logical continuation of Reagan's against "the evil empire." But these continuities should not blind conservatives to the radicalism of America's post-Sept. 11 foreign policy.... Mr. Bush has applied his doctrine of spreading democracy to an area of the world where the Reaganites feared to tread....
Yet there is one area where Mr. Bush has exceeded the expectations of everybody on the right--party building. He is arguably the greatest Republican party builder since William McKinley...
Adrian Wooldridge, January 15, 2009:
(with Greg Ip): [Bush] leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history... approval rating... stuck in the 20s... the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession.... Bush family name... now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”....
Frank Bruni, who covered his election campaign for the New York Times, wrote in 2002 that “the Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster.”...
Bush’s presidency was also poisoned by his own ambition. Mr Bruni’s “timeless fraternity boy” wanted to be a great president.... Mr Bush frequently spoke about how much he hated anything that was “small ball”. His close advisers repeatedly described him as a “transformative president”.... Other facets of Mr Bush’s personality mixed with his vaulting ambition to undermine his presidency. Mr Bush is what the British call an inverted snob. A scion of one of America’s most powerful families, he is a devotee of sunbelt populism; a product of Yale and Harvard Business School, he is a scourge of eggheads.... He also styled himself, much like Reagan, as a decider rather than a details man; many people who met him were astonished by what they described as his “lack of inquisitiveness” and his general “passivity”.
This led Mr Bush to distrust the Washington establishment, and even to believe that establishment wisdom was probably wrong simply by virtue of what it was. Fred Barnes, a conservative journalist, entitled his book on Mr Bush “Rebel in Chief”. He quotes one Bush confidante as saying: “One tux a term. That’s our idea of outreach to the Washington community.”
Lack of curiosity also led Mr Bush to suspect intellectuals in general and academic experts in particular. David Frum, who wrote speeches for Mr Bush during his first term, noted that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House”.... Mr Bush relied heavily on a small inner core of advisers.... Dick Cheney... pushed Mr Bush forcefully to the right on everything....
Karl Rove... obsessed by pursuing his dream of a rolling Republican realignment, subordinating everything to party politics. Mr Rumsfeld regarded the Iraq war... as an opportunity to test the model of an “agile military”....
The fruit of all this can be seen in the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory.... Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.... The Iraq war was a case study of what happens when politicisation is mixed with incompetence. A long-standing convention holds that politics stops at the ocean’s edge. But Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats “Defeaticrats” whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror....
How will Mr Bush be judged in the light of history? “Many historians”, says Princeton’s Mr Wilentz, “are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”... Mr Bush’s presidency is not without its merits. He supported sensible immigration reform. He proposed tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the now-nationalised mortagage agencies. Congress stymied him on both points.... On trade, too, Mr Bush’s heart was in the right place, though policy was at first subverted by political or strategic priorities....
[H]is policy of cutting taxes while increasing spending—of simultaneously pursuing big government and small government—dramatically swelled the deficit. He inherited a projected ten-year surplus of $5.6 trillion and bequeaths a ten-year deficit of $6 trillion.... Hardly the makings of a positive judgment from future historians. In pursuit of his fiscal ambitions, Mr Bush helped roll over or sweep aside long-standing rules and conventions designed to keep the deficit in check....
The neoconservatives who had such influence over Mr Bush argued that unintended consequences were usually more important than the intended ones. The Bush presidency has proved them right in this, if in little else. A president who laboured to produce Republican hegemony ended up dramatically weakening the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is now in a more powerful position than it has been at any time since the second world war.... Americans who came of age during the Bush years identify with the Democrats by the largest majority recorded for any age cohort since the second world war.
A president who believed that America’s global supremacy was guaranteed by America’s unrivalled military power ended up demonstrating the limits of both.... Iran is more powerful than it was in 2000, and closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb; Russia and China have extended their web of alliances and strengthened their regional influence. Mr Bush’s recalibration of his policies in his second term suggests that even he recognises that America’s loss of soft power has cost it dear....
“I inherited a recession, I’m ending on a recession,” he noted at his press conference on January 12th. He wasn’t asking for pity, only to be judged on what happened in between. Unfortunately, that economic legacy is littered with wasted opportunity, bad judgments and politicised policy. The budget surplus he inherited is now a deficit, the fiscal hole in America’s retiree programmes is bigger than ever, the tax system is an unstable, patched-up mess.
It is not all his fault. But for the most part, good policy repeatedly took a back seat to Mr Bush’s overweening political ambition. Both the country and, ultimately, the Republican Party are left the worse for it.
