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Publisher’s Note: This is the first of a series of analysis of the Bush administration that will be published here over the holidays. Watch for other commentary from HPI’s Mark Schoeff Jr., Jack Colwell, Peter J. Rusthoven, Kevin Kellems, Sheila Kennedy and Dave Kitchell in the coming days as we present our first draft of history of President George W. Bush.
By BRIAN A. HOWEY
I was drawn to my March 13, 2003, pre-Iraq War shock and awe analysis as I set out to write my first draft of history of President George W. Bush. The first four sentences read:
“This is brinksmanship on an epic scale. Within the next month there could possibly be, as the rock band REM might say, the ‘end of the world as we know it.’ President George W. Bush is taking a huge, calculated gamble, leading the nation into a war a majority of Americans appear to believe is morally correct. The danger lies in its execution, the retribution of our enemies, and the impact on an economy that has been described as ‘the dagger aimed at the heart’ of the Bush administration.”
But it was my seventh paragraph that in retrospect is fascinating: “There have been warnings of budget deficits topping $300 billion, an acknowledgment from the Bush administration that his second round of tax cuts likely wouldn’t have a near-term stimulus, and an ominous warning from Warren Buffett about derivatives becoming ‘time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system’ and ‘financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal’ to the banking system.”
The seventh paragraph was prescient. Few Americans were worried about derivatives on the eve of the Iraq War. The final Bush years became a nexus where the Oil Presidency, the loosened regulations on Wall Street, and the utter lack of an energy policy taking into account national security implications, became the perfect storm that howls as Bush and Cheney prepare their exits. There are now $7.5 billion in funded and unfunded securities. The Washington greenback printing press is roaring. Because of a lack of an energy policy and a federal mandate for the Big 3 to produce more energy efficient cars and trucks, it is now threatening 20 percent of Indiana’s economic sector - automobiles. That Bush said in his 2006 State of the Union speech that “America is addicted to oil” comes off in retrospect with virtual childlike naivete.
Here we stand today in the penultimate month of Bush’s eight-year legacy. Despite Republican accusations hurled last fall that Barack Obama was a “socialist,” we find the “conservative” Bush presiding over an American economy with essentially state-owned banks. Taxpayers might even find themselves as owners of auto companies. In the irony of ironies, it may be Bush who extends a lifeline to the United Auto Workers. As China morphs into capitalism, the U.S. is morphing the other way. We have witnessed the greatest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society. The budget has gone from a $431 billion surplus in January 2001 to at $455 billion deficit on Oct. 15.
In July 2005, Bush spoke at Indiana Black Expo, celebrating a rise in African-American home ownership. “That’s good for America,” Bush told 3,000 gathered at the RCA Dome. Embedded here - and certainly not constricted to any particular race - were the seeds of another disaster, the mortgage meltdown. This was Bush’s “ownership society” that found a deregulated Wall Street and a snoozing Securities and Exchange Commission presiding over mortgages lent to people who couldn’t afford them, then bundled and sold into what would become “toxic” debt that now requires a $700 billion taxpayer bailout with no guarantees. While the seeds of this deregulation were planted during the Clinton years, candidate Bush would observe at the Metro Church in Indianapolis in July 1999, “Prosperity must have a purpose. The dream is for you. No great calling is ever easy and no work of man is ever perfect. But we can, in our imperfect way, rise now and again to the example of St. Francis - where there is hatred, sowing love; where there is darkness, shedding light. where there is despair, bringing hope.”
Four days after this analysis was published, the New York Times reported: Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed. There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials. From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone. He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.
“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007 (New York Times). “Had we, we would have attacked them.”
Bush ironically brought about “hope” in the form of Barack Obama. His 32 percent disapproval rating created the door for Obama to win Indiana’s 11 Electoral College votes this week. Exit polling would show that 60 percent of Hoosier voters saw the economy as the top issue (compared to the 17 percent in 2004’s leading issue of “moral values” spurred by the Bush/Rove gay marriage ban wedge strategy) and 52 percent of them voted for Obama. Asked by ABC’s Charlie Gibson if he helped Obama win, Bush blamed the Republican Party. “I think it was a repudiation of Republicans. And I’m sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me. I think most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy.”
The near collapse of American capitalism also led to an extraordinary and breathtaking reversal by Bush, who told CNN earlier this week, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” It was almost like Morley Safer watching U.S. soldiers torching Vietnamese villages with Zippo lighters to save them. In statements that could allow him to join the company of President Herbert Hoover, the Decider added that his decisions were made “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”
“I am sorry we’re having to do it,” Bush said. “I feel a sense of obligation to my successor to make sure there is not a, you know, a huge economic crisis.”
Not a “huge” economic crisis? Bush explained further, “Look, we’re in a crisis now. I mean, this is … we’re in a huge recession, but I don’t want to make it even worse.”
Sen. Dick Lugar told students at the University of Indianapolis on Dec. 13, “It’s too early to tell whether it is of the same magnitude of the Great Depression of 1929 and ‘30. This is a crisis because it is very huge, but at this point it’s not of proportions of many we have seen before. . . . Rather than be consumed by the crisis of fear, we need to really be exhibiting more confidence.”
Americans are scared; their fear having incubated for the past few years. When Howey/Gauge began polling in February of 2008, the fear expressed by respondents - well before $4 a gallon gas and the Wall Street and Detroit collapses - was palpable.
Thus, a legacy of the second Bush presidency is the direct opposite of Franklin Roosevelt’s most enduring quote: “The only thing we have to fear is … fear itself.” The Bush presidency was all about fear. Iraqi drones spraying U.S. cities with anthrax. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Or gay marriage. “Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.”
The Oil Presidency
There was to be great volatility with gas prices during this Oil Presidency, with the political price paid on both war and gas in November 2006 when Indiana became the only state to flip three congressional seats from Republican to Democrat. By the end of the Bush presidency, prices rose to $4.19 a gallon and fueled Barack Obama’s improbable victory in November. That they tumbled to $1.40 a gallon this month is indicative of the wild swings that are buffeting the markets, business owners and consumers. Deflation is now a major worry and a sign of a truly sick economy. While many urged Bush to create an energy tax that would bring a $60 a barrel floor to oil prices so as not to undercut the
President Bush did promote the hydrogen car, but it would have taken decades for a distribution system to be set up.
ethanol and coal gasification facilities under construction in Indiana, it appears to be another missed opportunity.
That the bottom dropped out of gas prices this fall at a time when huge commodity trading departments at Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers disappeared is also telling in the nexus of Wall Street and Big Oil.
Lugar said at a Purdue University energy summit in August 2006, “Neither American oil companies, nor American car companies, have shown an inclination to dramatically transform their businesses in ways that will achieve the degree of change we need to address a national security emergency. Most importantly, the federal government is not treating energy vulnerability as a crisis, despite an increase in energy related proposals.”
Lugar has long blamed the Bush administration for a lack of a cohesive energy policy. “Our failure to act will be all the more unconscionable given that success would bring not only relief from the geopolitical threats of energy-rich regimes, but also restorative economic benefits to our farmers, rural areas, automobile manufacturers, high technology industries, and many others,” Lugar explained. “We must be very clear that this is a political problem. We now have the financial resources, the industrial might, and the technological prowess to shift our economy away from oil dependence. What we are lacking is coordination and political will. We have made choices, as a society, which have given oil a near monopoly on American transportation. Now we must make a different choice in the interest of American national security and our economic future.”
Lugar told the Deloitte Energy Conference in May 2007, “The president’s energy activities are barely registering in the American consciousness. In large part, this is because there is no energy campaign upon which he has visibly and repeatedly staked his reputation and legacy. With the possible exception of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, there is nothing in the Bush domestic energy program that a well-informed American would identify with this administration.”
Osama bin Laden’s Sept. 11 attacks were aimed at destroying the American economy. The attacks caught the unprepared Bush administration by surprise. The U.S. and Western response was measured in billions of dollars, and a near collapse of the airline industry. Bin Laden’s stated goal was oil at $150 a barrel (it rose to $147 a barrel last summer), and the destruction of Western economies. Even as he hides in his Pakistani cave, it’s not hard to argue that he’s come close to his goals.
Iraq War
The Iraq War represents Bush’s greatest gamble and, perhaps, his best chance of improving his standing among our 44 presidents. There was no WMD in Iraq, as weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned at the time. The White House induced “group think” and a passive press (which is now facing its own era of atrophy and bankruptcy) helped pave the
President Bush visits a wounded soldier. (White House Photo)
catastrophic route. The idea of preemptive war became a facade for a president’s personal vendetta against a dictator who once tried to kill his father. Great American presidents ranging from Lincoln to FDR endured bad military leadership and stunning defeats before the Grants, Shermans, Eisenhowers and Pattons emerged. Bush has his David Petraeus, but not until he goaded the insurgency as Lincoln and Roosevelt never did: “My answer is, bring ‘em on,” he said as the Iraq insurgency gathered over the July 4 weekend in 2003.
Or “Dead or alive.” Mission accomplished. Sophomores in power.
Hoosiers heard the warnings of Sen. Dick Lugar, who became a man firmly outside the circle of power. It was alarming when Newsweek reported in July 2003 that Lugar was worried about the American people being blindsided by the true costs of blood and treasure. “This idea that we will be in Iraq just as long as we need and not a day more is rubbish!” Lugar was quoted in 2003. “We’re going to be there a long time. Where does the money come from? How is it to be disbursed and by whom?”
Nina Easton would write in the Boston Globe in July 2003 that Lugar discovered the “haphazard” way in which American reconstruction costs were being handled. The White House needed “the discipline of actually constructing a budget for years,” Lugar said at the time. “We need to fill in the blanks. We cannot have numerous surprises, a sort of ‘gotcha trail’ as we keep running out of money.” Last Sunday, the New York Times reported on a 513-page, unpublished draft of a federal report that depicts the American-led reconstruction of Iraq as “an effort crippled by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country and then molded into $117 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.”
Once again, in the last few weeks, Bush has blamed the tragic miscues in Iraq to “intelligence failure” even though authors like Bob Woodward, Michael Gordon and Thomas E. Ricks (along with former Bush communications director Scott McCleland) documented the hyped intelligence that sold the war.
Vice President Cheney would say in Nashville in 2002, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. Time is not on our side. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.” In his book “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” Ricks noted that retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni “nearly fell off his chair” when he heard Cheney speak. “In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence and never - not once - did it say, ‘(Saddam) has WMD.’ It was never there, never there.”
ABC’s Gibson asked Bush earlier this month: “You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?”
Bush responded, “I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington … during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.”
Gibson pressed, “No, if you had known he didn’t.”
“Oh, I see what you’re saying,” Bush responded. “You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.”
Eighty-eight Hoosiers - from Richard Blakely, 34, to Nick Idalski, 23, to Zachariah Gonzalez, 23 - would pay the ultimate price.
It is Iraq, however, that could salvage part of the Bush legacy. If Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates can orchestrate an orderly drawdown, and Iraq becomes a stable democracy and prolific oil producer, Bush’s standing in history will certainly improve from today’s brutal first drafts.
The hallmark claim of the Bush presidency is that since Sept. 11, 2001, he has kept the U.S. “safe.” The 9/11 Commission Report authored in part by Hoosiers Tim Roemer and Lee Hamilton, called the attacks, “a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. By September 2002 the executive branch of the U.S government, the Congress, the news media and the American public had received clear warning that Islamist terrorists meant to kill Americans in high numbers.” CIA Director George Tenet described it to the Commission as “the system was blinking red” in the spring and summer before the attacks.
Even as Bush exits, Roemer warns that America might see a WMD attack within the next five years. In its “World at Risk” report issued earlier this month, the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism explained that “the U.S. government has yet to fully adapt to these circumstances and to convey the sobering reality that the risks are growing faster than our multilayer defenses. Our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing.” This is part of the Bush legacy with an unknown ending.
Bush Successes
There have been some Bush administration successes. It has been the most aggressive presidency fighting AIDS. If you are pro-life, the Supreme Court of Hoosier-born Chief Justice John Roberts is closer than ever to a repeal of Roe vs. 
Wade. The federal bench is much more conservative.
There have been many other controversies: the more than 700 presidential signing statements, the handful of vetoes as Congress went on a spending rampage, the expansion of government after candidate Bush campaigned on conservative economic principles and against nation building. The true central front of the War on Terror - Afghanistan - is an eroding situation and one of the biggest challenges facing the Obama presidency. So, too, is a conclusion to the U.S. role in Iraq. The other hallmark is that George W. Bush didn’t reach out beyond his circle. In all the books on Iraq, Lugar - despite his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - barely shows up in the footnotes. The aforementioned authors describe President Bush as intellectually incurious at a time when the stew of ideas and discussion should have been intense.
Thus, the Bush administration of today has brought us an America gripped in economic crisis and potential depression, an economy where Americans have seen the values of their homes and cars shrink for the first time in modern history, where the next generation may not live as well or as long as the previous 10 generations. We find No Child Left Behind under-funded and America facing a science and math student shortage. His stem cell research ban may have slowed the search for cures of the cruelest diseases. There has been no remedy to the immigration controversies. We have the two wars with unknown endings. GNP and savings are down; poverty is up. Bush has taken a compliant and mute Republican Party into a new wilderness while blaming it for his own excesses, hype and shortcomings.
Politically, Indiana is now a blue state with a 6-3 Democratic congressional delegation - something almost unfathomable eight years ago. This is not the bottom line to the Bush-Cheney years that anyone could have comprehended when it all began.
Postscript: They Didn’t Like Ike
I was born in 1956 under President Eisenhower, whose own first drafts of history had consigned him to the ranks of the mediocre bottom third. Like Bush, he often mangled syntax and wasn’t seen as an extraordinary or creative chief executive. As he left office, he faced a contrast with the Camelot presidency of John F. Kennedy.
Since the first Eisenhower historical drafts, he has ascended into many historians top ten lists as as one of our country’s best presidents. Eisenhower kept the nation out of four wars, ended the Korean conflict, built the interstate highway system and started the space program. As historians finally accessed his papers, they found a probing, intellectual chief who in retrospect made many wise decisions.
Thus, beware of these first drafts of history, for time will certainly alter perspectives, supply clues to mysteries and answer the most elusive questions we have today. The flash of crisis can alter perspective. There is no access to the presidential papers. It’s like a political poll: a snapshot in time that can burnish subject and author as either a prescient seer beyond the horizon … or a fool with a keyboard.
Tags: Brian A. Howey, Charlie Gibson, Dick Cheney, Dick Lugar, Dwight Eisenhower, George Tenet, George W. Bush, John Roberts, Lee Hamilton, Thomas E. Ricks, Tim Roemer
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