AHC: Successful W presidency

Minty_Fresh

Banned
Maybe going after Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad immediately when invading Afghanistan would have helped?
The problems of Afghanistan in my view and the Taliban issue were not going to be fixed with taking out leadership or controlling strongpoints. People point to pictures of unveiled women in Kabul in the 60s, but the true heart of the Taliban, southern and southeastern rural Afghanistan, were different stories entirely. The fact of the matter is that Northern Afghanistan and Kabul are ethnically and socially almost a different world.
 
Its simple, have 9-11 not occur. and then Bush can be the President he wanted to be and can focus his attention on things other than the war on terror.
 
Avoid the Neoconservatives. The Bush administration was the "Greatest Hits" of a half century of bankrupt right wing ideas and the people espousing them. These were the people advising Bush on everything, and with a Republican Congress, Neoconservatism had a free hand to govern and implement policy. The results are enough to discredit it, and that dragged down the Bush administration. My stance on anti-neoconservatism is one of the few areas I am hopelessly partisan, because you cannot argue with me that there is even a glimmer of reasonability in any of it or the people who support it. However, it must be noted that it is not like Bush was innocent in all of this, like he was this aloof doofus bumpkin who was misled by others. Bush made the decisions he did and surrounded himself with the people he did because he was Bush.

Avoid the tax cuts. Tax cuts became the silver bullet to American Conservative economics. In all Capitalist economic theories, tax cuts have their place. However, even in the classical model of economics which this idea acts like it is based on, tax cuts are not a silver bullet that work no matter what. The tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, and managed to squander away a historic and unprecedented surplus, which we could have used to pay off national debt and solve other funding issues. The economy also obviously went into the worst recession since the Great Depression, so you would also need to avoid that. On the whole, proper regulation and a responsible economic framework.

And obviously there is the avoidance of the war in Iraq. However, it needs to be reiterated that all these things happened because Bush was Bush. If you want a successful Bush presidency, elect someone else.
 
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An addendum to my own my posited scenario, this is the dream scenario for Bush for 2004. He gets a 5% boost (And thus another five percent less for Kerry/Democrat) for taking out OBL and his handling of Iraq. 446 electoral votes to 92, in case you were curious BTW. As a side note, it boggles the mind that just over a decade ago Arkansas could be to the left of North Carolina in a national election.
 
Maybe going after Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad immediately when invading Afghanistan would have helped?

We did terribly in Afghanistan we didn't close the exists before the mission and go in slow and methodical so yes Zarqawi and his couple hundred followers got out to Iran then Iraq so did most of the AQ and Taliban leadership to Pakistan.

Zarqawi was as brilliant as he was evil, he managed to be big, but not too big like IS to become the real enemy to everyone and turned groups against each other and got the democrats screaming it's a civil war we need to leave now. Still if his 2002 planned attack on Germany had come off you might have seen Germany support the U.S. on the war along with Russia and France who would follow suit.

But, Bush made a lot of political mistakes in his second term namely he should have shelved SS reform. Retaining the Iraqi Army won't solve all your problems, it will lessen some of them, but Bush needed to read the riot act to Assad and the military needed to do a bunch of things it had to learn how to do.

Here is the thing though success or failure I don't measure by poll numbers if I did then Bush's father would be one of the greatest successes off all time in 1991 and one of the worst failures the GOP has seen in 1992.

Anyone who determines how well a President did by polls need to really think about that equasion.

If you want to look at Bush's numbers today which are near the mid 50s the public views his leadership as Commander in Chief as his biggest asset and his economic handling his biggest negative by far as the public blames the economic crisis of 2008 squarely on him.

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