President Bush - What Went Wrong?

On Sunday, it will be one year to the day until George W Bush steps down as US President. But truth be known, he may as well do it now, because he won’t be able to achieve anything radical in his final year. His brand is damaged beyond repair abroad, and he is neutered at home – he has become the very definition of a lame-duck president.

His critics will be very satisfied that his tenure as President will be ending on a whimper. And given the numerous blunders of the Bush Presidency, I can’t help but think it is deserved. When the history books are written, Bush Junior will languish with the other failed Presidents. His historical peers will be James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, and Ulysses S. Grant. 2001-2009 will be seen as a bleak time for the US presidency.

But it didn’t have to be that way. For a long time, Bush was a popular President (at least in the US). He won re-election in 2004 – and this time the result was beyond dispute. He could have been a successful and popular President. After all, Reagan was dismissed as a lightweight prior to being in office, and had peaks and troughs in the polls whilst resident in the White House. Yet now he is venerated as one of the greatest Presidents since FDR. The same could have been true of Dubya.

So what happened? Or, more pertinently, what went wrong?

Yep, the Iraq War hasn’t gone to plan – although given the US lacked an exit strategy that is hardly surprising. But the Iraq War – and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan – had the approval of the US public at the start. And Bush Jnr won in 2004 against the backdrop of the War. It may be an ongoing headache for the Bush administration, but Iraq was not the knockout blow.

Likewise, the 2006 elections didn’t go Bush’s way. It was, at least partly, a referendum on how the president was doing. But it was also a reaction to the way congressional Republican were behaving – particularly after the Mark Foley scandal. Yes, those elections damaged Bush, but he (and the Republicans) were already tainted before a ballot was cast.

So what was it? What made Bush a lame duck?

Bush set himself up as a capable decision-maker – as a level headed, bold leader in a crisis. Yes, he might not be able to understand the finer points of macro-economic theory (or, indeed, be able to string a sentence together), but when the shit hit the fan, he could be relied on. Bush lived off his reputation after 9/11 – of standing at Ground Zero, with the bullhorn, giving America pride again.

With the benefit of hindsight, he was always setting himself up for a fall. And that fall came – not with another terror attack, but when the levees broke and when New Orleans flooded.

The Bush administration showed total incompetence in the face of what was both an avoidable and manageable disaster. Bush procrastinated whilst New Orleans drowned. Hurricane Katrina showed that it wasn’t just the terrorists that the US had to worry about – nature could be just as harsh. But when the latter struck, Bush was shown up. He wasn’t in control. The carefully constructed façade was washed away.

And those affected most by the disaster made it even worse for the President. Here, poor black people were dying. When it came to an attack on the financial districts of New York, Bush came running, bringing with his the awesome might of the US military. When New Orleans came calling, Bush seemed to look the other way. For what it is worth, I don’t think that Bush was racist in his response to Katrina. But from that point on, the unpleasant undertones of racism were next to impossible to overcome.

The deterioration on Bush’s standing can be traced back to Katrina. For the first time, people really started to question him. If Bush wasn’t capable of dealing with a natural disaster, was he really capable of dealing with the war in Iraq? Suddenly the news from Iraq was given a negative spin. As the economy started to hit the skids, and as the Republicans began to sink into scandal in Congress, it became inevitable that Bush’s influence would take a sound kicking in 2006. By the time he offered up Rumsfeld as a sacrifice, it was too late. His reputation was in tatters, and people were already looking to who would replace him.

Harold Macmillan was once asked what was most likely to blow a government off course – his alleged reply (“events, dear boy, events”) lives on in history. And the words stick when we consider the failed presidency of George W. Bush – he dropped the ball when it came to Katrina, and the cost was massive. It sent him down the path of becoming a lame duck president, and it will leave him with a terrible legacy for the history books.