Nowhere man: a farewell to Dubya, all-time loser in presidential history
* Simon Schama
*
o Simon Schama
o The Guardian,
guardian.co.uk
o Monday November 3 2008
"Forgotten but not gone" was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that the most impassioned moment in John McCain's performance in the final debate was when he declared: "I am not George Bush."
Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.
Simon Schama: 'The deciding was very much done by Dick Cheney'
Link to this audio
Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself "the decider" has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush's own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.
Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners - and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.
If Bush himself has been largely kept out of sight, his baleful legacy has been visible in the McCain campaign. McCain has made much of his credentials for independence of mind, a claim which once was credible given his support for immigration reform and opposition to Bush's tax cuts. But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, all of this became less important than the lessons of the Reagan-Bush-Rove political playbook which, with the exception of the Clinton election of 1992, seemed to have a track record of unbroken success.
McCain knew this from bitter personal experience, having been on the receiving end of Bush lowball politics in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Coming out of a convincing win against George Bush in New Hampshire he was stopped in his tracks by a smear campaign conducted through push-poll phone calls in which people were asked whether they knew that the daughter McCain had adopted from Sri Lanka was in fact the illegitimate child of an affair with a woman of colour. Now you would think McCain could never reconcile himself to a politician capable of those kinds of tactics. But there he was in the campaign of 2004, stumping the country for the incumbent, ingratiating himself with the conservative base he knew he would need, even as his old Vietnam buddy, John Kerry, was being coated in slime by the Swift Boaters.
Whatever misgivings McCain might have had about adopting the hardball tactics of his 2000 adversary have long since disappeared before the blandishments of classic Bush-style operatives like Rick Davis and Stephen Schmidt. "Do you want to be pure, or do you want to win"? they must have asked right after the nomination. Ditching Joe Lieberman as a running mate and unleashing pitbull Palin was his answer.
So even while George Bush is kept at arm's length from the campaign, his campaign style lives on as Obama is stigmatised as a terrorist-friendly stealth-socialist, too deeply unAmerican to be let anywhere near the Oval Office. "He just doesn't see America as we do" says Sarah Palin trying to wink her way into Dick Cheney's seat. McCain is betting the house that this way of doing politics has at least one more hurrah left in it, and we will find out on in the early hours of Wednesday morning whether he is right.
The Bush presidency is the spectre haunting the feast in more than tactics. Although every conservative administration since Ronald Reagan has promised to deliver, through supply-side stimulation, economic growth without bloated deficits, they have never been vindicated in their blind faith in what Bush senior once rashly called "voodoo economics". Consistently, they have brought the US Wall Street crashes and recessions along with massive deficits; and yet somehow, the stake that history attempts to drive through the heart of their economic theology never puts the ghoul away.
No weight of evidence to the contrary has ever shaken the totemic belief that tax cuts can grow the economy robustly enough to compensate for drastic shortfalls in revenue. George W Bush clung to this belief even as the Clinton budget surplus was converted into a mountainous deficit, and John McCain continues to parrot the same belief with the shining face of a true believer.
Not even Gibbon could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a barmitzvah.
If you look at this saga as the history of a dynasty; it's come full circle. For, believe it or not, there once was a time when Bush politics was about centrist moderation. Dubya's revered granddad, Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of an Ohio railroad executive and senator for Connecticut from 1952 to 1963, was punished in the Catholic towns of industrial Connecticut for his connection with Planned Parenthood. Not only that, but he was a trustee of the United Negro College Fund, the kind of institution that made the eventual career of Barack Obama conceivable.
But the Bushes have always been selective about idealism. And even at the height of the Kennedy-Johnson apogee, Prescott and George Herbert Walker Bush were turning the pages of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. They could smell the wind direction changing. The future of Republican money and Republican power lay elsewhere; with Texas oil. Hence the migration to Midland Texas of George Herbert Walker Bush and his makeover into a Texan who knew the ways of the corporate world; and how to bring about the Great Cosiness between government and business that seemed like the perfect feedback loop: money to power, power to money; tax breaks for the corporations; donations to those who might command the heights.
This is the politics George W Bush inherited, and he has been its faithful disciple; to the point of purging it of any remaining traces of pragmatism. It is astounding to hear rightwing talkshow bloviators rant about the predicament of the Bush administration being caused by its failure to carry out the true conservative agenda. For there never has been and never will be a more doctrinally faithful instrument of the creed. Never mind the hanging chads of 2000, the Cheney-Bush administration seized the moment to bring on the Goldwater-Reagan Rapture in which government was once and for all got out of the way of business.
So it hasn't really been all George Bush's fault, the stupendous American fiasco. He came to power armed with an ideology that was about to crash and burn; that was, years before the present tumult, already fatally disconnected from historical reality. It was on his watch that American government needed reinventing. It was responsible government that was needed in Iraq and Afghanistan; government that was desperately needed in New Orleans after Katrina, while all George Bush could manage was a fly-by. It is government that this most anti-governmental of all American administrations is learning that is needed now to save the United States from a second Depression.
In his heart of hearts I actually think the shell-shocked Dubya, somewhere in the bowels of his presidency knows this. But he is nowhere to be found, and so on goes the mad rant that health care reform and progressive taxes are the Trojan horse for socialist revolution. To which those who have another view altogether might want to say, fear not, for yours, as a Republican president once said, is a government of the people, by the people. And really it will not perish from the earth.
* Print thisPrintable version
* Send to a friendSend to a friend
* Share thisShare
* Clip thisClip
* Contact usContact us
* larger | smaller
Email
Close
Recipient's email address
Your name
Add a note (optional)
Your IP address will be logged
Share
Close
* Digg
* reddit
* Google Bookmarks
* Yahoo! My Web
* del.icio.us
* StumbleUpon
* Newsvine
* livejournal
* Facebook
* BlinkList
Contact us
Close
* Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
* Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk
* If you need help using the site: userhelp@guardian.co.uk
* Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
+44 (0)20 7278 2332
*
o Advertising guide
o License/buy our content
World news
* George Bush ·
* US elections 2008 ·
* John McCain ·
* Barack Obama ·
* United States
More comment
Related
Oct 19 2008
US election: Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama for president
Sep 25 2008
Younge America: Presidential debates are just theatre
Sep 25 2008
US elections: McCain and Obama clash over debate delay
Sep 24 2008
US election briefing: UN and Congress edge out candidates
* Print thisPrintable version
* Send to a friendSend to a friend
* Share thisShare
* Clip thisClip
* Contact usContact us
* Article historyArticle history
Email
Close
Recipient's email address
Your name
Add a note (optional)
Your IP address will be logged
Share
Close
* Digg
* reddit
* Google Bookmarks
* Yahoo! My Web
* del.icio.us
* StumbleUpon
* Newsvine
* livejournal
* Facebook
* BlinkList
Contact us
Close
* Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
* Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk
* If you need help using the site: userhelp@guardian.co.uk
* Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
+44 (0)20 7278 2332
*
o Advertising guide
o License/buy our content
About this article
Close
Simon Schama: a farewell to Dubya, all-time loser in presidential history
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday November 03 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 12.36 on November 03 2008.
RealClearPolitics
Latest Presidential Polls
Election 2008 Obama McCain RCP Average
National 51.6 44.3 Obama +7.3
Battlegrounds Obama McCain RCP Average
Florida 48.6 46.8 Obama +1.8
Pennsylvania 51.3 43.7 Obama +7.6
Ohio 49.0 45.8 Obama +3.2
North Carolina 47.7 48.3 McCain +0.6
Virginia 49.8 45.5 Obama +4.3
Indiana 46.2 47.6 McCain +1.4
Minnesota 51.6 41.8 Obama +9.8
Colorado 50.8 45.3 Obama +5.5
Iowa 54.0 38.7 Obama +15.3
Nevada 49.6 43.4 Obama +6.2
New Mexico 50.3 43.0 Obama +7.3
New Hampshire 52.8 42.2 Obama +10.6
Battleground States | Latest Polls | RCP Electoral Map
RealClearPolitics produces a comprehensive average of recent presidential election polls.
Bestsellers from the Guardian shop
* Le Creuset five piece stoneware set
Le Creuset five piece stoneware set
Save £22 on the rrp
From: £39.99
o Visit the Guardian offers shop
o Buy eco, organic and fair trade products
comment is free…
Latest posts
*
Nur Laiq
26min ago
Delivering the Keys for Obama
Nur Laiq in Florida: The scales could tip either way in the Florida Keys – and there are all kinds of barriers to getting out the vote
1 comment
*
Michele Hanson
55min ago
Has Barclays no shame? Here we are on the brink of beggary, and it's egging me on to spend more
Michele Hanson: Mention bonuses, bankers and greed to ordinary people and they turn into Mount Krakatoa, pouring out molten fury
2 comments
Comment from the paper
*
Andrew Simms: Cassandra's lethal paradox
*
Anne Karpf: Islamofascist slanders
*
Tony Travers: The Borisocracy is settling in - and leaning centre-left
Free P&P at the Guardian bookshop
*
Beacon
o Beacon
o £10.00 with free UK delivery
*
Cook Your Own Veg
o Cook Your Own Veg
o £16.99 with free UK delivery
* Browse the bestsellers lists
* Buy books from the Guardian Bookshop
Latest news on guardian.co.uk
Last updated less than one minute ago
*
News
America's moment of truth
*
Sport
Driver's father reveals hurt at racists
*
Comment is free
Nowhere man: a farewell to Dubya, all-time loser in presidential history
*
Sponsored features
*
*
Guardian Jobs
* USA
* UK
USA
*
Location Manager - Gettysburg National Military Park - Gettysburg
places to work! imagine working at a highly rated heritage property? at a resort surrounded by stunning... will possess a culinary arts degree and 3+ years of... . pa.
*
Family Practice
proud of its strong heritage, its strong work ethic... orchestra, pasquerilla performing arts center, community arts center, allegheny highlands regional theatre... . pa.
*
Dermatology
culture-rich community known as the "city of the arts" includes museums, galleries, music, and heritage sites celebrating the art, architecture, history, and... . nc.
Browse all jobs
UK
*
Web & eCommunications Manager (Interim)
business link in london. london. £38,000 - £40,000 + Excellent Benefits.
*
Director of Education
english speaking union. greater london. c. £36 000.
*
Office Manager
thompsons solicitors. greater manchester. Circa £37,516 - £46,565, including car allowance.
Browse all jobs
Related information
World news
* George Bush ·
* US elections 2008 ·
* John McCain ·
* Barack Obama ·
* United States
Jim Alley, left, and Warren Hickison kiss in front of the State Capitol building, Sacramento, during a rally in support of gay marriage rights
Don't get wedged off Obama
Sep 23 2008:
Gay marriage has been a wedge issue in recent elections. Gary Younge hopes Obama's race doesn't make him the wedge candidate
More video
Jul 14 2008
Bush lifts presidential ban on offshore oil drilling
Jul 14 2008
Reihan Salam: Saving the Republican party
May 16 2008
Bush appeasement slur angers Democrats
May 15 2008
Bush denounces Democratic negotiation offers during Israel visit
Final day of the Democratic national convention
US election: Day four of the Democratic convention
Aug 28 2008: The final day of the Democratic convention culminates with Barack Obama's presidential nomination acceptance speech
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 |
