September 20, 2006
Does Bush Care Too Much About the Long Term? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Max Boot, foreign affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an interesting column today called “The Stubbornly Hopeful President.”
In it he worries that President Bush might be focused too much on the long term. “There is a certain fatalism that can come from focusing so much on the long term. (Bush spoke repeatedly of how the world would look 50 years from now.) There is a danger that you will not make the necessary short-term adjustments to achieve results here and now.”
It is interesting, to say the least, that Bush is a President with a historical perspective, caring more about what the world will look like in fifty years than what The New York Times will say tomorrow. His predecessor in the Oval Office, of course, was frequently accused of acting in just the opposite way.
Bush increasingly reminds me of Harry Truman. Truman was endlessly vilified and belittled by intellectuals (“to err is Truman”), and when he left office he had a public approval rating that was lower than Nixon’s when he resigned in disgrace. Regardless, Truman did what he thought was right, also looking at things from a historical perspective. Today, of course, Truman is universally regarded as one of the near great Presidents.
How George Bush will be regarded 50 years from now is anyone’s guess. Mine is that he will be vindicated by history.
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