Well, allow me to talk about it, since there seem to be a number of random, if well-meaning, comments from random people who are not really conservative or anything. Strictly speaking, neither am I. I’m a Radical Conservitarian-Liberal Purist Textualist demi-Originalist (Reformed). However, I am about as close as anything on this board.
Bush is a strange duck. Always was. This is one of the things which made him so easy to like and hate: there was always something in his odd mannerisms and speech which offended his critics vastly more than any political, and something in his quiet, confident dignity of action which pleased his supporters. He also felt no need to apologize for the former or brag about the latter, which further encouraged both sides. These also colored the perceptions radically. I rather suspect a great many of the Left - including dozens on this very board - could not help but hate him.
I mean hatred: irrational, all-devouring, unrelated to any oplicy or political consideration. He was fundamentally part of a different, somewhat more respectful and respectable, but far less socially-savvy and self-aware, subculture. Bush was familiar with the city but saw himself and presented himself as rural American, and that was merely the uppermost tip of the iceberg.
Now, this is important, because while he connected with almost everyone in the Republican Big-Tent on a cultural level, he had his own policy ideas which meshed with precisely none of the them, except a handful of north-eastern Republicans a la Olympia Snowe. This is perhaps no accident because he was politically more or less a similar liberal himself.
He garnered a lot of support.
In reference to Iraq, I argued then, argued after, and argue today that it was and remains vitally neccessary to altering the Middle East, and it has had very good effects already. Things have changed there. Not much as we might count it, perhaps, but give it time. It may be generations before it isn’t a mess, but that’s the price for not building a real empire (as opposed to the fictional, lefty strawman version).
They did have WMD’s, though not in the form and readiness we thought, but that was the casus belli, not the fundamental reason for the war. The reason were the larger piolitical and global issues at stake, and the need to fundamentally alter the political dynamics of the MidEast. It has done that, and at a far lesser cost than any other possible method. If you wish to claim it was not worth it, that’s a debate for another time. Yet I recall that more than a few Dopers claimed it was a failure early, and then repeated that, and that Bush simply changed things as neccessary in order to fix it every time.
But that is just one example. All told, Bush was a canny political operator who expertly manipulated the world situation to the States’ advantage. Though he could nto control everything, fundamentally we more and more governments respecting us by doing what we wanted them to do, while hostile governments around the world were voted out or weakened. They didn’t like us, or at least loudly bragged about not liking us, because it was easy to dscore cheap politiocal points that way, just as on the surface they all love Obama. Except, of course, that Bush got results where Obama has caused a series of escalating foreign policy problems. It is the difference between the game of power politics (i.e. how it is actually done), and the pretend-scheme of believing the polite ficitons of diplomacy.
Interestingly, Bush was also heavily advised by another group of liberals-with-a-muscular-foreign policy, the neocons. The irony burns, of course, since that is yet another hilariously innaccurate label for the Left to label anyone they don’t like.
Regardless, his domestic policies are another matter.
Bush essentially never moved on anything any conservatives wanted domestically, which pissed a lot of us off to a very considerable degree. He had essentially no notion of cost/benefit and didn’t do anything useful during his early domestic strong period of the Presidency, before 9/11. I think he may in fact have been avoiding taking Presidential action, hoping to have a “quiet” presidency where the country could basically settle down and live without more than the usual political back-and-forth.
That didn’t happen, and for reasons not entirely clear, he pushed through a fairly liberal, and certainly Big-Gov agenda. What’s more irritating is that we’d have been a lot happier had he simply paired up programs with an appropriate conservative plan.
For example, conservatives mostly didn’t give a rat’s ass about immigrant amnesty. What bothered us was that it was being done with no plan to straighten out the immigration situation, which positively encourages illegal immigrants. I have no problem with people wanting to move it. I do have a problem with people wanting to move in without obeying the law. We were ignored in the White House.
The Harriet Miers fiasco. Good God, what was he thinking? Yes, Presidents nominate justices. Fine. Why did he think people were going to sit down while he put a tight political ally, with little training, interest, or experience, into the judiciary? It boggles the mind.
Now, the port deal didn’t ultimately bother me. I felt it was a mountain over a molehill, with no real logically consistent reasoning behind the panic. There wasn’t any particular reason to get upset or believe that just being Saudis would make them help smuggle terrorists and/or weapons.
I could go on (I don’t like the Patriot Act but also don’t see it as a giant threat, the compeition twixt COngress and White House to see who could make a bigger, more useless Homeland Security department is hilarious stupid) but most things were not any one “big” issue as much as a slow process of him plain not thinking about his own supporters and voters. And he was still effective in Washington - he just was increasingly uninteresting. He didn’t strengthen his side, and rather let his support dribble away by not pushing for things we wanted and insisting on things we were annoyed or outright furious over.
