By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, September 13, 2012
The theme of the president's 2012 re-election campaign is
that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be
expected to clean it up in four years.
In other words, 43 months of unemployment rates above 8
percent, $5 trillion in new borrowing, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, gas
prices of nearly $4 per gallon, a dive in average family income and involvement
in two wars were all due to George Bush and simply too difficult for anyone
else to overcome. So Obama cannot be judged on his record between 2009 and
2012.
At first glance, this is a most unusual claim. Gerald
Ford followed the mess of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and the Arab oil
embargo. After serving for less than three years, he failed to win re-election.
His successor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to make a bad situation even worse. He
exited four years later, tagged with a high "misery index" fueled by
rampant unemployment and roaring inflation.
Ronald Reagan took office under Carter's baleful legacy
but ran for re-election successfully in 1984 based not on "Carter did
it," but on the recovery he engineered.
Bill Clinton was elected on "it's the economy,
stupid" in 1992, and he was re-elected four years later after claiming
credit for boom times. George W. Bush inherited the aftershocks of the dot.com
meltdown, and a country ill-equipped to respond to terrorist assaults after the
nonchalance of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the 9/11 attacks, Bush was
re-elected on the themes of a good economy and a safer country.
Blaming or praising presidents for their four years of
governance is an American tradition. That is why Obama asserted at the outset
that if he could not turn around the economy, his presidency would be a
"one-term proposition."
Like all presidents, Obama inherited both positive and
negative legacies. True, there was a war in Iraq, but the surge -- which
candidate Obama opposed -- had by mid-2008 mostly won the peace. That is why
Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker had already negotiated a
timetable for American withdrawal. Obama followed that settlement; he no more
ended the war alone than did he start it. For Obama to claim sole credit for
ending the war in Iraq would be about as fair as blaming Obama for making
things worse in Afghanistan -- given that more than twice as many Americans
have died in that war on Obama's watch than were lost during the entire eight
years of the Bush administration.
Obama did inherit a terrible economy in January 2009, but
one not quite still in full free fall from the mid-September 2008 panic --
which abruptly gave Obama a four-point lead over John McCain in the polls after
being down four points.
By Inauguration Day 2009, the gyrating stock market had
bottomed out, and the Dow Jones industrial average had not dipped below 8,000
in four months. The TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) rescue package had
been enacted by Bush in October 2008, stopping runs on the banks and mostly
restoring financial stability.
Blaming Bush for some of the mess is legitimate in
politics, but the housing bubble and collapse -- the catalysts for the
September meltdown -- were a bipartisan caper of pushing Freddie Mac and Fannie
Mae to underwrite risky subprime loans to the unqualified who had no business
buying homes at inflated prices. Washington insiders ranging from Clintonite
Rahm Emanuel (Obama's former chief of staff) and Franklin Raines (a Clinton
administration grandee) to Tom Donilon (the current national security advisor),
James Johnson (an Obama campaign bundler) and Jamie Gorelick (deputy attorney
general in the Clinton administration) got in on the Freddie/Fannie
profit-making despite thin banking resumes. Even with the last four months of
crisis, Bush still averaged a 5.3 unemployment rate for his eight years in
office.
Obama should be congratulated for ordering the successful
hit on Osama bin Laden. But the intelligence apparatus and antiterrorism
protocols that provided much of the expertise for the mission were well
established when Obama entered office -- despite his own prior verbal attacks
on Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention and the
Patriot Act, all of which he almost immediately embraced without a nod of
thanks to his predecessor.
Obama, for example, inherited the controversial Predator
drone program, an anathema to liberals during the Bush administration. But
Obama expanded the drone missions and in four years approved the killings of
seven times as many suspected terrorists as Bush had in eight -- to the sudden
silence of the antiwar Left.
It is past time for President Obama to forget Bush, and,
like all of his predecessors, make the argument that things are better than
when he entered office almost four years ago, and that he deserves the credit
for the turnaround.
Voters will weigh that claim. And history will judge
George W. Bush on his two terms -- as it will judge Barack Obama's own four (or
eight) years in office.
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