Yahoo news is claiming that Bush’s reputation is making a comeback
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3491615
I don’t buy it myself, but I have seen a lot of folks further to the right than me who are feeling disenchanted with Obama, so I could believe an overall lessening in antipathy. And time does tend to give a rosier patina to people and events.
I haven’t got a debate, but I thought this might engender one, and couldn’t figure out whether to put it here or in the Pit.
It’s too soon to tell; that article is really just about the two books with an unsupported speculative glaze on top. If it was too soon for historians to decide he was the worst president ever in 2008, then it’s still too soon to decide he actually did fine. It seems to me that Republican candidates this year are still pretending that he pretty much didn’t exist, which doesn’t speak well for the state of his reputation.
Everyone always looks better in the rear view mirror. With time passing its easy to forget how awful a president he really was. All you remember is his winning smile, and the fact that he isn’t the current president who is currently in your face, and who you dislike because he isn’t cleaning up his predecessors messes as quickly as you would like.
I seriously doubt he’ll ever be considered a successful President. The decade over which he presided was a pretty crummy one for the US, his domestic initiatives either floundered (SS reform), are unpopular (NCLB) or were justified with his “Compassionate Conservatism” political philosophy that he appeared to abandon later in his Presidency (medicare prescription drug benefit). Iraq may be turning out better then expected, but I think people underestimate how much of the anger over that war stemmed not from how difficult a slog it turned out being but the fact that what people believed its primary purpose to have been turned out to bunk.
That said, I’m kind of surprised that his numbers haven’t rebounded more then they have. If nothing else, you’d think Republicans that abandoned him at the end of his Presidency would start thinking more fondly of him now that they’ve closed ranks against Obama. Apparently the political doghouse is harder to climb out of then I thought. Once people have decided you suck, it sticks.
ETA: I also like how basically all the empirical evidence in that article contradicted its thesis.
That’s not necessarily true. Given time, the revisionist historians (to borrow one of his favorite phrases) will come out in force. People who worked in his administration will try to get jobs on TV and such. And not to be morbid, but eventually he’ll die and some things will get glossed over. I still remember how that went with Nixon.
And Truman is much better-regarded now than he was when he was POTUS.
That’s true. I shouldn’t paint the process of re-evaluating presidents as only a negative. It really does take time to see what the long term consequences of their decisions are going to be and which actions turn out to be really important.
And GHW Bush stopped looking so bad when Junior got the keys to the car.
I don’t know. I never stopped hating Nixon even after the guy croaked.
I truly doubt I will ever forgive Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld for the damage they did to the US both domestically and abroad.
The fact that war crimes aren’t even on the table speaks more about Realpolitik and behind-the-scenes maneuvering than it does a lack of evidence for conviction (in my not-so-humble opinion.)
But despite all the attempts to restore Nixion’s legacy, he’s still widely disliked. His disapproval ratings on this 2007 poll blows every other President out of the water. Which is my point, all the PR campaigns in the world don’t really help once people have made up their minds that they hate you.
Of course, eventually the people who lived through the Nixon Presidency will die and be replaced with people who haven’t already made up thier minds, so eventually he might rebound. But he’s been stuck in the political doghouse for thirty years, and I think Bush is going to suffer a similar fate, regardless of how many books his wife writes saying that he’s really a nice guy.
There are at least two reasons for this:
Obama is continuing many of the security policies and practices started under Bush, like holding people indefinitely without trial. So fans of Obama are muting their criticism of Bush’s decisions in this area.
The current Republican party has gone so far off the rails to the right that Bush is beginning to look reasonable in comparison. This is similar to my own feelings about Reagan – who I used to despise but who seems like fuckin’ Gandhi in comparison to W. And Nixon – he’s pactically Jesus to me now!
I do hope that one day the reputation of History’s Greatest Monster, Jimmy Carter, will be salvaged. He deserves a lot more credit for his administration than he gets. (A point we have debated on this Board before.)
Reasons for what? Again, there doesn’t really appear to be any empirical evidence that Bush’s reputation is on the rebound. The polls given in the article say his approval ratings are more or less where they were when he left office, and people still blame him for the economy.
Making Ado About Nothing In Order To Make it Seem Like Something:
GOP wants to pretend Bush wasn’t a disaster, so people’ll think about trusting whoever the next Yahoo is they run for president.
No real debate, but I think it’s too early to tell. I expect that Bush’s ratings will go up a touch in the short term just because he’s not on the hot seat anymore, while Obama is. Plus, Iraq hasn’t been the unmitigated disaster some folks (including me) were thinking it would be, which has probably helped a bit.
Overall, I can’t imagine Bush ever being considered a successful president, no matter how things pan out in Iraq and Afghanistan (IMHO, no matter what happens in Iraq, Afghanistan will always be a huge Bush failure, regardless). The best he can hope for is a lessening of antipathy over time from some of the less fervent anti-Bush folks. For my part, I’m about in the same place I was when he left wrt my feelings towards the man. Nothing I’ve seen since has thus far changed my overall opinion.
-XT
It would certainly be hard for his reputation to get worse at this point.
If (a whole LOTTA if) Iraq makes it through the transition and becomes a moderately stable democracy, Bush’s image is going to get quite a boost.
Forget about whether we should/n’t have gone in in the first place, the distortions of hindsight will overcome most of the visceral emotion of the past (except for the thousands who suffered direct loss), particularly if the then-current warm fuzzies of a mid-east democracy/nominal ally are in the air.
Again, this is a whole lot of IF.
Does anyone know offhand what Bush has been doing since leaving office? To the extent that his reputation can be salvaged, I think most of it will hinge on his post-administration actions.
My gut feeling tells me he won’t be as high profile as Clinton, or even Carter, which will pretty much doom his legacy. I don’t foresee a PR campaign by other administration officials. Rove has been pretty quiet AFAIK, and Cheney’s been doing his thing. Neither of them strike me as being terribly concerned about Bush’s legacy beyond token defenses to counter the guilt-by-association perception. I can’t think of anyone else offhand with any gravitas who wasn’t “resignated.”
You’ve preordered the book though, right?
Decider Points?
I mean, give the man a chance.
He can change you! 
He stayed out of the public eye for a while, like they usually do. His first public speaking appearance was at some kind of motivational speaking event. He’s been involved in writing this book, obviously. I don’t know what else he’s doing.
Rove is on Fox, which is pretty much what you would expect. Colin Powell doesn’t talk about it much but he’s pretty bitter about what happened on his watch, and his ex-deputy Lawrence Wilkerson was the one who said recently that Bush knew there were innocent people in the Guantanamo prison. Cheney has been more vocal in criticizing Obama than I thought he might be, but then again, I think on some of those issues he’s voicing opinions where he and Bush diverged.