Part I
In many ways I feel bad for George W. Bush. Certainly he has made some really stupid mistakes—and I’m talking about actual documentable ones, not the imaginary ones liberals/Democrats have concocted on a daily basis (e.g., knowing about 9/11 in advance but letting it happen for political gain; letting New Orleans drown because he hates black people.)
But despite his flaws, I believe that President Bush has a good soul. For this reason alone he is light years different from his Democrat predecessor and successor, both of whom exude the narcissism, self-righteousness, sense of entitlement, and need for instant gratification that are the cornerstones of baby-boomerism. Unlike the smug finger-wagging Bill Clinton, Bush is loyal to his loved ones and friends. Unlike Barack Obama, he has a deep respect for his country and its foundings.
Another trait I admire about George W. Bush, which is also completely wasted on liberals/Democrats, is that he is gracious. Remember the temper tantrums the Democrats threw Bush was finally deemed the winner of the 2000 election? Remember the Clintons leaving the White House with $20,000 worth of damage, including stupid childish pranks like the “W” key missing from 100 computers?
Yet, the minute Barack Obama was elected president, Bush has been nothing but helpful and welcoming. The media, who have made it quite clear can’t wait for their Messiah to replace him, couldn’t stop pressing Bush about how he’s helping with the transition. All Bush had to answer, really, was this: “Let’s put it this way, I’m treating Obama way better than Bill Clinton—and you—treated me in 2000.”
Another significant way Bush differs from Barack Obama this that while Obama only talks about making “the tough choices,” George W. Bush actually made the tough choices required of the president of the free world, even if that meant his popularity would suffer. And suffer it did.
In contrast, I’d wager that Barack Obama never made a tough choice in his entire life, or at least his political life. No one who votes “present” in the Senate as much as he did knows the first thing about making tough choices. Someone who as a candidate kept promising to “restore our moral standing in the world”—Translation: kowtow to morally bankrupt Marxist-socialist and Islamo-fascist regimes in order to win their favor—has neither the desire nor the balls to make “the tough choices.” (Maybe I’ll do a post on this at another time …)
That’s why I fear for the next four years. Bush strives to do what was right; Obama, like Clinton before him, live to do what’s popular. This is why, as many pundits claim, history will treat George W. Bush much more favorably than his contemporaries have.
Many liberals/Democrats erroneously explain President Bush’s dismal approval numbers over the past few years as an indication of the failings of conservatism and a signal of its demise. They think that even conservative voters have come to some realization that their ideology is a failure, and so they abandoned ship. (This is also why many on the left think the end of the Bush era also means the end of Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; they couldn’t be more hopelessly wrong but that’s another story.)
Let’s face it: Because of the visceral hatred of him by the left, Bush’s starting point was regularly not much more than 50%. His popularity after 9/11 was a politically-motivated fluke. Any liberal/Democrat who supported him was doing it only as long as it was politically expedient. As soon as Bush starting making the … oh, yeah, tough choices … which damaged his popularity, that was a signal for popularity-obsessed Dems to start jumping ship.
But the reason Bush’s approval ratings hit the gutter in recent years isn’t because conservativism failed; it’s because Bush failed to be a conservative. (Some would even argue that Bush was never a true conservative; his whole concept of “compassionate conservativism” was just big government liberalism with a different name; to some degree I agree with that argument.) Aside from the War on “Terror,” Bush failed conservativism: from No Child Left Behind to the amnesty bill debacle to the recent bailouts.
With all that big government spending, Bush should have been a liberal’s dream Republican president. What ruined it for them, of course, were his deep faith in Christianity and its positions on issues such as abortion, his “disturbing” moral clarity in the War on “Terror,” his horrible oratory skills, and his Republican connections.
So, in the end, Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his presidency was because he was too conservative for liberals, and too liberal for conservatives. Kind of like another Republican who recently lost a presidential election …
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