What would the state of US politics be like now if Bush was competant?

Great Debates
1

I was reading a Slate article today which asked:

and I thought it would be an interesting question to ask the board. So what if the Bush administration managed to enact the same policies it is enacting today but in a competant manner?

That is, he would of still pushed for war in Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, suspending civil rights, increased government spending, abstinence based sex education, falsifying EPA reports and denying global warming and all of the other policies he has been criticised for on this board. Abu Gharib would have still happened, Katrina would have still happened. Halliburton is still going to get the bulk of the reconstruction contracts.

But the plan for post-invastion reconstruction of Iraq would have been much better thought out and the insurgents would be managable if not completely crushed by now. Afghanistan would have been more well run, FEMA’s response to Katrina would have been praised rather than excoriated.

What would the political climate of this country be like now if that were the case? Would people still be protesting about the injustness of the war and the suspending of civil liberties or would they have gone along with it more readily? Would people still be arguing about Global Warming and subsidies to Big Oil?

In other words, how much of the opposition to George Bush is because people think he’s evil and how much is because people think he’s useless?

2

I saw a C-Span’d talk with Scott Ritter and Sy Hersh, and Ritter made I think a great point: Americans aren’t upset that we went to war in Iraq. Americans are upset that we’re LOSING in Iraq.

If Bush had been able to invade, subdue, and democratize Iraq and Afghanistan he’d pretty well be an unstoppable god. I think we’d be debating about Social Security right now, not the wars, wiretapping, and civil liberties.

3

I am not *competent * in politics, so I will abstain from participating in this thread.

4

I think the loony left would still have a hard on for the man regardless…they were ranting about him even before the smoke cleared in 2000 (even before the election in fact IIRC). I’d say that the majority of the people who are anti-Bush today have come to that from the series of fuckups he and his administration have driven us too. Mostly Iraq in fact…it almost always comes back to that. Had Iraq gone the way the it was envisioned originally, if there was peace, stability and prosperity in Iraq and Afghanistan today, then I think Bush would be in a much different position than he currently enjoys…with a MUCH higher approval rating. After all, the economy is doing pretty well, most people are fairly happy on the home front…its just the spectacular foreign screwups (revolving mostly around Iraq) that have his numbers so low.

Just my opinion. For my part, I’d be bitching about Bush’s spending and some of the stupid shit he’s done with the economy and entitlement programs (spending like a drunken sailor or a liberal with the keys to the collective money box :)) instead of Iraq myself…but I probably wouldn’t feel quite as venomous about him to be honest, as the economy IS doing fairly well, and in theory at least we can get out of the hole he’s digging us into with a strong economy.

-XT

5

Kind of a truism, isn’t it? “If Bush were more successful, he’d be more popular.”

But I think I get what you’re saying. My response is that while if Katrina in particular hadn’t been a complete governmental disaster, he’d be a lot more popular, some of his ideas were doomed from conception. Iraq would have turned out a disaster in any case. It was just a bad idea. While things could have been differently to mitigate the problem, I don’t think most Americans would find the war in Iraq to be satisfactory, even if it were done right.

Also, if the administration had truly been willing to give the problem the amount of planning and resources it deserved, I think they ultimately would have concluded that invading Iraq simply wasn’t worth the effort.

6

Your OP is flawed. You’re including many of his incompetancies in as “policy.”

  • pushed for war in Iraq
    Probably not. If he was competent he wouldn’t have the “I have to show up daddy”-complex that made him want to take out Saddham.

  • tax cuts for the rich
    Probably.

  • suspending civil rights
    Probably not. Pulling out all stops, fail-safes, and morality from everything so as to be able to achieve your goal to show up daddums, doesn’t seem likely for someone competent. Certainly, I think that a tougher anti-terrorism engine would have been put in place, and perhaps some qausi-legal stuff done for the sake of spying and performing surgical hits, but not to any level that it would have been out of range of what any reasonable person wouldn’t quietly give the pass. Certainly not random jailings and torture on the hope of turning up anything whatsoever.

  • increased government spending
    We still would have gone to war with Afghanistan, so probably at least some. It really depends on how competent we are trying to make him, as trimming off the budget requires the compliance of a lot of other individuals.

  • abstinence based sex education
    Meh. Probably. Unfortunately this one is less an issue of competence and more on the teachings of his personal flavor of Christianity.

  • falsifying EPA reports and denying global warming and all of the other policies he has been criticised for on this board
    Perhaps I missed the debates on these, but that I have ever read, his stance wasn’t that there wasn’t global warming nor that pollution shouldn’t be cut, he was just saying that following the UN agreement, all that would happen is that lots of Americans would lose their job and pollution would be increased as various factories were moved to China and other countries which have little to zero anti-pollution policy.

  • Katrina would have still happened
    Certainly the hurricane would have happened, and the flooding (which I understand to have been more the fault of the governor.) But the whole handling of everything after that would have actually been pulled through competently.

  • Halliburton is still going to get the bulk of the reconstruction contracts.
    No knowing. If Bush was competent, he probably wouldn’t have taken Cheney on as VP.

7

I don’t think there is any question that “you can’t argue with success” is valid. So had the Iraq adventure been successful I believe GW would be OK on that score. However, I think the probability of success in the sense of Iraq having gotten a stable, representative government in the eight years GW is given to gain that objective is so remote that it’s not worth considering.

As to the other policies, such as expanded government powers to snoop, or imprison without trial and the like, I would be opposed no matter how successful they appear to be in the short term. In the end such things are inimical to personal freedom which I think is one of the things that a government is supposed to protect.

His environmental program seems designed to preserve the status quo. Efforts to control pollution and such things as greenhouse gasses would provide opportunity for economic growth in areas that don’t even exist now but would cause a lot of upheaval in the existing economic pattern. All of GW’s buddies are heavily invested in the existing pattern and so he opposes any change in that pattern. That doesn’t sit well with me but I think maybe most people would be on his side in this. Or at least they would until the environmental degradation and things like climate actually affect them. And such changes are so subtle and insidious that he wouldn’t have to worry until long after he’s out of office. In fairness I must disclose that I am retired and economic upheavals won’t affect me a lot. If I had to change jobs, move to a new location or things like that I too might take a different view of environmental policy.

8

I don’t know if you can call his conduct of the war incompetent because I am not convinced that a competent approach exists. It might be that once Saddam fell, that no policy and no amount of troops could have prevented the civil war from breaking out sooner or later.

You can certainly call the decision to invade incompetent, as was the response to Katrina, as was the decision to torture, etc. Had he not invaded Iraq and focused on cleansing Afghanistan and Pakistan of the terrorists within their borders, history would be much kinder to him. Assuming that the Iraq invasion was incompetent in concept no matter how it was carried out, removing that incompetent decision would make the US stronger economically (the deficit would be much smaller) and politically (much less anti-US sentiment abroad). The Democratic takeover of Congress would not have happened and we’d be looking at a Jeb Bush run in '08.

9

Off the topic, but I just wish we had thrown all of those resources we used on Iraq at Afghanistan instead. Afghanistan would be full of KFC’s, Starbucks and paved roads by now.

10

The question becomes in a sense how much are his policies fatally flawed, and how much are they good ones incompetently executed. Your answer depends on where you sit politically.

Let’s look at the economy. I think it is hard to argue that his economic policy has been incompetently executed. However there is deep dissatisfaction with the economy despite the fact that it is good by many measures. I don’t know if this would have swung many elections, but the dissatisfaction comes from the the inherent nature of the policy - giving most benefits to the rich and to corporations - rather than the execution of it.

Whether Iraq would have erupted or not is an interesting question - but we certainly could have done a lot better.

11

I agree with the others in that Bush’s unpopularity is largely due to failures of his administration, mostly Iraq. People would be much more supportive of Bush if things were going well there. The far left would still hate him, but he’d have approval ratings of 80+%, IMHO.

However, there are some issues which Bush is on the wrong side of, public opinion wise, that would be costing him votes no matter what. He’s weak stance on immigration enforcement is hugely unpopular, especially with his own base. He’s also in the minority on abortion and stem cell research, but those are more of a grey area which could vary depending on the phrasing of the questions.

His inability to control spending isn’t a winner, popularity wise, but I don’t think that’s a deliberate policy by him. I’d put it into the “incompetant” category. I think he really does want to reduce spending and simplify the tax code but he just hasn’t been able to and/or hasn’t been willing to put the needed effort into it.

12

Just like now! What are you, a commie?

13

That number sounds optimistic to me. I agree that if Iraq were in better shape Bush would be much more popular than he is now, but I don’t think he’d have over 80% approval ratings. The only time his ratings were that high was between 9/11 and spring 2002; he never even broke 75% after about May 2002, not even in the approval spike of spring 2003 when the first phase of the war seemed to be going well.

Why do you think he really wants to? His track record doesn’t seem to support that conclusion. I agree that he really wants to cut taxes, but I’ve seen no evidence that he has any genuine interest in cutting spending. ISTM that he’s perfectly comfortable just piling up debt and letting future administrations make the hard choices about fiscal responsibility.

14

I think that if his policies had been ‘competently executed’, that flatly implies victory and completion in both Iraq and Afghanistan by now. If he’d pulled those off, that is, if Iraq and Afghanistan were now both peaceful democratic nations had been for the last few years, even if nothing else was different, he’d be an unstoppable juggernaut now. I think even most Democrats would be somewhat impressed.

15

That’s for damn sure. If Bush’s policies had managed to transform Afghanistan and Iraq, as they existed in late 2001, into peaceful democracies by now, he’d be an absolute miracle worker. I still might not agree with him about some or all of his other policies, but I would have no hesitation in calling him the greatest war president of the past several decades, hell, possibly of the past two centuries.

But this is where the difference between competence and policy feasibility comes in. An intelligent, competent president should know better than to undertake foreign policy adventures that he really would have to be an absolute miracle worker to pull off successfully. It may be nice to dream about being called the greatest war president of the past two centuries, but reality-based governance requires some awareness of when achieving success in an ambitious enterprise would actually require a miracle.

16

Yah, well, the rules of the OP were that he still enact all the same policies as he actually did, so the war would still be in. And the only way to competently run a war is to go and accomplish at least the majority of your objectives.

17

A competent president would have listened to intelligence before invading a country. Bush concluded that since the CIA couldn’t find any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, then they obviously must be hiding them. That’s the kind of reasoning that drove the American military over the cliff and into the Euphrates.

He should have listened to his father: there’s no way to invade Iraq and occupy it successfully. What’s come to pass is what all the experts predicted wout come to pass. I won’t entertain the question “What if our invasion of Iraq had succeeded?” because that’s kind of like asking, “What if Emo Phillips played a game of football against the Pittsburgh Steelers all by himself and won?” It just wouldn’t happen.

Had Bush been competent, I’m sure he would have put forth all kinds of policy that I find revolting, but he would have gotten it through. Ronald Reagan was competent, and he did all kinds of things that I find horrible, too. But Ronald Reagan never got us bogged down in a Mideast quagmire, which makes Ronald Reagan a better president than George W. Bush, and in my book, it’s awfully tough to be worse than Reagan.

A competent George W. Bush would have known that attacking Iraq wasn’t at all smart. He would have done much of the other crap he did, though. I think that if Bush’s agenda got acted upon, the country would still be tired of it and would be leaning Democratic, though, because his policy ideas only help a small sliver of Americans.

18

I’ll bite.

Let’s say we’d had someone considerably more, umm, Machiavellian, shall we say, at the helm.

• Assuming that we’re right that invading Iraq was marked down as a desirable outcome long before 9/11 provided the excuse, Iraq would still have been invaded.

• Far more skill would have been used in getting the rest of the world on-board with that. The outpouring of good will towards the US after 9/11 would not have been squandered. A supposedly international coalition, ostentatiously including several Islamic nations, would have in practice been American’s hand wearing an international glove, if only because we were dumping in the lion’s share of military personnel and materiel + acting the wounded nation with an injury to avenge.

• It would have happened a bit later, with a much better mop-up in Afghanistan. A more concerted effort to corral OBL would have been made. A successfully captured OBL would have shot the Prez approval ratings sky-high.

• A transition to the subject of Iraq would have been accomplished either through a sudden event (akin to the Gulf of Tonkin or Remember the Maine, if necessary, but less easily revealed as bullshit due to the modern internet age etc etc…definitely somethjing better than that stupid yellowcake story!) or as a slow buildup of concern. Not (as one person on this board once put it) “Afghanistan Al Qaeda Afghanistan Al Qaeda Afghanistan Al Qaeda and so we’re invading Iraq”.

•There would have been a goal. Either the deposing of Saddam Hussein, in which some other Baath leader would’ve been put in charge and handed the keys after displaying a wilingness to kiss American ass, or else the permanent acquisition of Iraq as an oil-bearing territory henceforth to exist as an American ‘protectorate’, in which case we would have gone in in force and landed with both combat boots the fuck on, and then used the oil to make nice with the rest of the world. Having Hussein and the Baathists in charge of all that oil was just asking for trouble, you know?

• There would be Democrats with solid military creds invited to participate in the administration. The ones so invited would not get bullshitted but told what the actual goal is.
I think if we manage to survive a few more careening plunges down the curvy road with Braindead sitting in the driver’s seat of this old bus, his tenure will be over and I will have been glad he was stupid as a brick of potting soil rather than clever and evil.

He has nevertheless been a monumental disaster and the ripples left by his stupid behaviors will be causing us problems for another two full generations.

19

My 2 cents worth of opinions:

Dubya and his staff are more competent than what most people realize. IMO, he has mostly achieved at this point what he had hoped to accomplish: please the large corporations who generously donated to his campaigns in '00 and '04. Why do I say this? Since the Bush administration came to power:

-the EPA has increased the permitted levels of toxins and heavy metals that can be released into the environment by industrial operations

-The USA has engaged in two wars that have become highly privatized (especially in Iraq). Many billions of dollars are poured into the corporations (roughly 60 IIRC; the big ones are Halliburton, KBR, CACI, Blackwater, Raytheon, DynCorp, Transatlantic Traders, L-3, Parsons, and Titan) serving in Iraq. Additionally, the defense contractors here on US soil and all their suppliers are also benificiaries of these wars.

Sure, the gov’t has had its blunders along the way and The United States of America may not be winning the war but at least Corporate America has won.

WMDs and al-Qaeda links to Saddam were bullshit excuses for war with Iraq. Osama and al-Qaeda had stronger links to other regimes including the USA, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Also IIRC, historically the most significant breeding grounds for international terrorists are Saudi Arabia (#1), Libya, and Egypt…not Iraq by a longshot. Oh wait…Saudi Arabia is our quasi-ally and we have friendly business relations with them…it would be unthinkable to attack them.

If Bush was interested in protecting our homeland from terrorists, then the bulk of our troops would be here at home protecting the borders of the homeland.

What? Are you implying that Bush’s spending is unrelated to Iraq?

20

I hit submit too soon, thus I continue…

Bush’s perceived lack of competence is a direct result of his motivations. This problem is only compounded by his real lack of competence which lead to poor strategic planning to secure Iraq.

FEMA is and has been extremely inefficient and incompetent regardless of who’s in the oval office.

My opposition to GWB is more rooted in his evil motivations. I can only speak for myself in giving a definite answer, but I estimate that both (‘evil’ and ‘useless’-ness as you say) are roughly equal factors in opposition for Bush among the general population.