NPR’s All Things Considered had a piece this afternoon about the Bush legacy. You could tell the tone they were going to take (if you couldn’t guess already) with the opening:
Once in office, he proceeded as though he had won a mandate. With narrow Republican majorities in Congress, he immediately won approval for education reforms known as No Child Left Behind and for a series of huge tax cuts.
When the press approves of a politician, this is called “fulfilling campaign promises.”
Much of the piece, naturally, was devoted to the war in Iraq and Bush’s missteps therein. But curiously, Iraq vanished from the piece after April 2006. One might think that an important part of President Bush’s legacy was his decision in 2007 to change strategy and increase troop levels, and our subsequent victory over the insurgency. But in NPR’s view, the only significant event in Iraq in the last two years was when some guy threw his shoes at the President.
NPR concludes by pondering the question of whether history will be kinder to President Bush than his contemporary critics. I think history will be unkind to Bush. Big-government conservatism has been a disaster, the evisceration of the Bush Doctrine (the early version that equated terrorists with the regimes that harbor them) was an epic mistake, and his missteps in Iraq have been serious. But, history will not ignore the year in which we reversed course and defeated the enemy. In that, history can hardly help but be kinder than his contemporary critics, or at least the ones at NPR.
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