September 23, 2006
Bush’s Endgame Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s reflections on George W. Bush raise an interesting question—in Mr. Gordon’s own words, is Bush “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?” Mr. Gordon answers yes, and further guesses that Bush will be “vindicated by history.” It will come as no surprise to readers that I disagree with Mr. Gordon on the second point. I think Bush is well on his way to worst-ever status. Not even James Buchanan or Millard Fillmore could compete with his record of colossal short-term failure and long-term calamity. With the collusion of a Republican Congress, Bush will have turned a modest budget surplus into an enormous deficit. He will have spent well over $1 trillion—and destroyed thousands of lives and families—to pursue a botched war that he initiated on the basis of bad intelligence. He will have failed in his grand designs to dismantle the welfare state and democratize the Middle East, and he will have left little legacy other than extreme partisan polarization. History, I suspect, will judge him accordingly. That said, I think Mr. Gordon is spot on about Bush’s long-term vision. Judging by his words and actions, Bush has boldly rejected the Clintonian model of centrism and gradualism. Bush’s ambitions were to dismantle the welfare state, which for good or bad he sees as incompatible with a new economy marked by extreme job mobility; in its place, he hoped to create a system of privatized health care accounts and privatized retirement accounts that would allow for increased individual choice but that would also have carried a great deal more individual risk. Bush also attempted to use the Iraq War as a blunt instrument to democratize an entire region, the Middle East. Whether such neoconservative projects are well-founded is a moot point. On the face of it, endeavoring to alter the political culture of an entire region is quite ambitious. Even those who revile his administration (I count myself among that crowd) should concede that George W. Bush reinvigorated the political debate by offering voters something outside of the box. In this sense, he was much like Barry Goldwater, who broke with the corporate liberal consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s to offer Americans a dramatically new kind of politics. As a voter, I’m not particularly fond of George W. Bush. But as a historian, I’m fascinated by what he attempted, and failed, to do.
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