Bush seen as a great president. No Tea Party ect?

[deathscompanion1]

Just wondering idly what if Bush handles things better either no Iraq or lucks out and it turns out reasonably well fairly quickly and the recession holds off for a while. Would the Republican stay more or less reasonable and the crazier elements not gain power?

If so when the democrats win 2012 (assuming they lose 2008) would the Republicans stay the course?

 

[Marshal Tito]

You might see the compassionate conservative/neocon crowd (for issues beside Israel that is) remain relevant resulting in a more internationalistic outlook for the Republicans and also a more moderate (albeit with heavy deficits) domestic policy.

 

[Thomas Jefferson]

Most likely a relative moderate such as McCain or Romney would win in '08, so a conservative backlash might be possible if they lost in '12 (much like actually happened when Republicans blamed McCain's moderation and Bush's deficits on the '08 loss), but it's hard to see it being as severe.

 

[jmc247]

How are you going to stop the housing and credit problems? Bush had no political support in the Congress from either party to do anything about it. Given how much money was coming in there would have been more political support for Bush dropping a nuke to try to prevent Hurricane Katrina from sinking NO.

 

[deathscompanion1]

How are you going to stop the housing and credit problems? Bush had no political support in the Congress from either party to do anything about it. Given how much money was coming in there would have been more political support for Bush dropping a nuke to try to prevent Hurricane Katrina from sinking NO.

I'm no real expert so I cant really say.

Perhaps Plan B pin it on the other party.

"I tried to sort it out but those Partisan Scumbags hate America."

 

[Superaquaspiderbatman]

Just wondering idly what if Bush handles things better either no Iraq or lucks out and it turns out reasonably well fairly quickly and the recession holds off for a while. Would the Republican stay more or less reasonable and the crazier elements not gain power?

If so when the democrats win 2012 (assuming they lose 2008) would the Republicans stay the course?

There are some, yours truly included, who see Bush as a good president. Iraq was avoidable, Afghanistan was not.
The recession, however, was not tied specifically to Bush doing/not doing anything, as has been said above.

 

[euromellows]

I watched an interview with Bush recently by the Hoover Institution. It was amazing how well he came across in one on one conversations. Even my wife was surprised by it and found him completely different from the basic caricature we had seen at press conferences or at official events over his 8 year presidency. I've since seen a few more such interviews and once again, he seems completely different (and likeable) from what I remembered of him at the time.

Granted I have only been interested in American politics from the outside, most particularly their foreign policy. But my guess is that if you can get more of these kinds of interviews and less of the caricature presented by Letterman, it might improve his standing overseas as well.

 

[deathscompanion1]

There are some, yours truly included, who see Bush as a good president. Iraq was avoidable, Afghanistan was not.
The recession, however, was not tied specifically to Bush doing/not doing anything, as has been said above.

I actually agree with this.

He just had insane amounts of bad luck three crisis's and two wars which was poorly handled by everyone involved. He wasn't great but I'd say he was good or at least not bad.

 

[deathscompanion1]

I watched an interview with Bush recently by the Hoover Institution. It was amazing how well he came across in one on one conversations. Even my wife was surprised by it and found him completely different from the basic caricature we had seen at press conferences or at official events over his 8 year presidency. I've since seen a few more such interviews and once again, he seems completely different (and likeable) from what I remembered of him at the time.

Granted I have only been interested in American politics from the outside, most particularly their foreign policy. But my guess is that if you can get more of these kinds of interviews and less of the caricature presented by Letterman, it might improve his standing overseas as well.

He does seem to be a nice guy out of office, I wonder how he would do as an elder statesman.

 

[unprincipled peter]

Put me down on the side that says Bush was one of the worst presidents of all time (Buchanon holds that title). He had plenty of help (no one man runs a country), but he basically held down the country while the fatcats raped it. Stunningly, Iraq has turned out nominally ok, but originally it was a mess, and was invaded for no valid reason. Afghanistan started out ok, but then he lost sight of our objective there to go adventuring in Iraq. Housing and banking had it's beginning back with Reagan. Bush 1 and Clinton kept adding coal to the fire, but GW saw the cliff approaching and yelled, "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead", so he gets a huge chunk of the blame. He was certainly no friend to the environment. He allowed religion to get in the way of science. I don't blame him at all for 9/11 (Clinton gets that glory), and Bush does get kudos for disabling al-queda (for at least a decade now).
He was nowhere near as stupid as made out to be, but he was bad for the country. To be fair, though, in today's political environment it's darn near impossible to be good for the country. You can, like Clinton, get lucky and preside over economic good times and be seen as being good, while ultimately being bad, but the political masses are so messed up that they'll prevent accomplishment of anything good.

I used to be a republican. Reagan and Bush 1 were good presidents. GW? one of the worst. It's going to take alien magic to make that guy good.

 

[jmc247]

I watched an interview with Bush recently by the Hoover Institution. It was amazing how well he came across in one on one conversations. Even my wife was surprised by it and found him completely different from the basic caricature we had seen at press conferences or at official events over his 8 year presidency. I've since seen a few more such interviews and once again, he seems completely different (and likeable) from what I remembered of him at the time.

Granted I have only been interested in American politics from the outside, most particularly their foreign policy. But my guess is that if you can get more of these kinds of interviews and less of the caricature presented by Letterman, it might improve his standing overseas as well.

The media invested alot in its caricature of Bush so it won't exactly let it go overnight. My guess is that after the next election it will start to abate.

Bush could help himself by giving more speeches, but he is more then happy keeping away from media as he doesn't have the kind of love of being in the public eye that Clinton does. He also is more then happy keeping out of politics.

 

[Rex Mundi]

What caricature? The man genuinely talked like an idiot on a number of highly public occasions.

 

[trajen777]

Bush’s greatest failour was in having the opportunity to do anything he wanted after 9-11 to reshape America and Congress and theworld would have supported it ; He chose the wrong thing :

He could have done : “we are selling our future away to people who use our oil money to make war against us”
A. Energy:
• 50% of US trade deficit is Oil
• Unify the USA to begin a Manhattan project of Energy independence focusing on
o Oil and gas exploration :
o Solar / Wind
o Nuclear
o Thermal for homes
o Natural Gas
o Other
• Cheap energy = increasing Manufacturing
B. Focus on traditional Conservative – Military / Economy (not social issues)
• No tea party or marginalized (think Reagan)
• Leave Gay rights / Abortion to states to decide or Congress or local communities
C. Attack afaganastan hard – take the troop losses and take out Tora Bora.
D. Skip Iraq
E. Have China live up to currency manipulation issues and tariffs (same with Brazil) -- I export to both from USA and Europe so it is XXXXXX ridiculous the tariffs and ect they charge (plus try and get your profits out of China and Brazil – GOD !!!!!!!)
F. Take the social network – Social Security/ Medicare / Medicate and extend the age start up by 2-3 years (for example when started FDR took the average life expectancy of the USA citizen and then stated these programs 2 years after the person died) – thereby making these viable programs.
G. Do not offer the tax breaks to the “above $400,000 income.
This would make USA non hated w foreign policy – stable financials – minimize the debt of the USA (no run up under Bush / Obama – maybe no national debt ) – no hard right swing of Republicans – heading towards energy independence. Less withdrawal of manufacturing.

 

[Cymraeg]

I loathed Bush and I regard his time in office as an unmitigated disaster. I think he was the worst President since Franklin Pierce. Iraq was the biggest foreign policy disaster since the Suez Crisis - and to make it worse he went into it with his eyes wide open and a total lack of planning, which is unforgiveable. His economic policies were almost as bad.

 

[jmc247]

I loathed Bush and I regard his time in office as an unmitigated disaster. I think he was the worst President since Franklin Pierce. Iraq was the biggest foreign policy disaster since the Suez Crisis - and to make it worse he went into it with his eyes wide open and a total lack of planning, which is unforgiveable. His economic policies were almost as bad.

There was a plan, in fact a really good one created by General Jay Garner and signed on to by President Bush.

Forward Observer: General Garner's Lament

When it comes to Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner has been there, done that for 15 years, so his new plan for getting out of the mess there might be worth listening to.

"You couldn't have gotten the 10 most brilliant men and women in America to design a way for us to fail in Iraq that would have been any better than what we have done on our own," lamented Garner, whom President Bush dispatched to Iraq to heal the country only to stand aside as Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III gutted the very post-combat pacification program that Garner had gotten the president to approve.

"I was never able to find out," Garner answered when I asked him where Bremer got the authority to reverse the presidentially approved plan shortly after taking over from the retired three-star general in Baghdad in May 2003.

Garner's plan called for keeping most of the Iraqi army intact rather than send thousands of troopers home with rifles but no jobs and to allow Iraqi school teachers and other vital professionals to keep working even if they had been forced to join Saddam Hussein's Baathist party.

"He just did it," Garner said of Bremer's scrapping of those two major parts of the general's master plan for putting Iraq back together again after Saddam fell. "Maybe Bush didn't know he was doing it."

http://www.govexec.com/defense/2006/12/forward-observer-general-garners-lament/23240/

The neocons in the Pentagon used Bremer to completely gut the plan Bush signed up for because they imagined Iraq without a military as an American protectorate for a century like post war Japan. They gutted the Iraqi Army without ever getting the ok of the President for it.

Mr. Bush has often said that will be for historians decide, but he said during his sessions with Mr. Draper that they would have to consult administration documents to get to the bottom of some important questions.

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/w..._r=0&adxnnlx=1189191906-TrPqSHhBuLZeSOvUKoinQ

Bush's biggest problem as a war President was after 911 he had put up in his office a photo of LBJ telling commanders where to conduct air strikes and he said he would never be that kind of President and he would leave the war up to the Pentagon and his generals. In doing so he allowed way too many cooks in the kitchen over the war policy with no unity of command until late 2006 when he took charge of the war policy. The President has to have control of war policy without micromanaging war policy.

 

[EnglishCanuck]

Bush could have never even been liked without 9/11. He was widely considered to have stolen the election, roundly despised by his political opponents and and was not even remotely in control of his own party. His advisors were terrible and it seems he was basically committed to being the leader of a nightwatch state and trying to push his own backwards social agenda and keeping the pressure on Saddam Huessein.

I sincerely doubt he could have been a two term president without 9/11.

 

[unprincipled peter]

don't know how the rest of the world sees it, but in the US, the view on whether he stole the election pretty much splits down party lines. Democrats think he stole it. Republicans think he won fair and square. As a former republican who now hates both parties, I think there probably more intended votes for Gore, but a lot of them were mistakenly cast for someone else, or weren't properly punched due to an idiotic voting process. That said, though, even after attempting to divine whether a chad was punched enough to count, and counting and recounting, following all legal processes in place prior to the election, Bush had more counted votes, and I have a hazy recollection of some news outlet doing a complete recount (in the year after the election) in the entire state, and Bush still came out on top.

Disputed, maybe. Stole? nope.

 

[Ariosto]

If only Frederick Smith agreed to be Secretary of Defense..............

Would not have solved all the problems, but keeping Rumsfeld out of office would keep a great deal of problems from even arising.

Would also help if John Danforth was picked for the Vice Presidency instead of Cheney.
​

 

[fscott]

He does seem to be a nice guy out of office, I wonder how he would do as an elder statesman.

Oh please IMO he is a light weight. He was a horrible President. From the TV coverage on 9/11, where he looked like Bambi in the headlights, to Katrina to the Wars. He is the worst President during my lifetime and Carter was better then he was.

 

[Cymraeg]

Oh please IMO he is a light weight. He was a horrible President. From the TV coverage on 9/11, where he looked like Bambi in the headlights, to Katrina to the Wars. He is the worst President during my lifetime and Carter was better then he was.

George W Bush was the reason that my wife, who comes from Oregon, actually put some serious thought into taking the Oath to Brenda and becoming a British citizen. Bush made her ashamed to be an American. Luckily Obama won in '08, because it would have made her miserable to give up her nationality.