As Obama Struggles, Bush's Legacy Recovers

By: John Dickerson
Topics: Economy ,; Foreign Policy ,; White House ,; Domestic Issues ,; Obama Administration

This post originally appeared on Slate.

President Barack Obama is photographed after delivering a televised address from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday June 15, 2010. He will deliver his second Oval Office address tonight.

(Credit: AP)

In November, George W. Bush will publish a memoir, Decision Points, in which he will try to put the tough moments of his presidency into perspective. His successor is already helping. On Sunday, President Obama spoke in New Orleans to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On Tuesday, he will speak to the nation about the final stage of the Iraq war. The back-to-back events could be called the Cleaning Up Bush's Messes Tour--what many Democrats would call the entire Obama presidency so far--and yet both events highlight Obama's struggles with disaster and war, potentially putting his predecessor in a more favorable light.

The bar starts low for Bush. The federal response to Katrina and Bush's decision to invade Iraq are signature fiascoes of his presidency, partly responsible for a political climate welcoming to an anti-Bush candidate like Obama. The simple passage of time also helps Bush's standing, as people forget their anger, encounter new things to worry about, or find themselves longing for traits they once despised after being deprived of them for 19 months.

As for Obama, he is not consciously trying to improve the public's view of the Bush years. Indeed, he is actively reminding people of the mess he inherited from his predecessor. It is a key theme of the entire Democratic campaign. At the same time, as Obama demonstrates the natural limits of presidential action, he unwittingly adds perspective to assessments of what President Bush could do. As he benefits from policies he once opposed--such as the surge in Iraq, which helped make tomorrow's speech possible--Obama proves that even a smart politician with the best of intentions can be wrong. And as he champions making tough calls even in the face of popular opposition, he often sounds eerily like his predecessor.

The relevant similarity between the federal response to Katrina and the BP oil spill (other than geography) is that both show the limits of the presidency and the federal government. Of course, a hurricane is different from an oil spill, and it's not necessary, for the purposes of comparison, to pass judgment on Bush's or Obama's response. The point is that from a purely logistical standpoint, it's hard to get the federal bureaucracy to move quickly. That's true whether you think the president is uniquely incompetent or a smart manager. A president weighing the benefits and costs of making a visit to the disaster area can catch similar grief for not taking command whether they're photographed in a plane or on a basketball court. And even an eloquent speaker can sound the wrong note.

On Tuesday night, President Obama will give a prime time address about Iraq as his predecessor did several times. He will announce the end of the American combat mission, a process started under Bush and which fulfills Obama's promise during the campaign to end the war. It has been more than seven years since Bush celebrated underneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner. The bad planning and hubris associated with the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq will fill volumes of brutal assessments. (They've already started.) The desperate situation Obama still faces in Afghanistan is the result of years of neglect and negligence caused by the Iraq war.

Yet Obama's announcement Tuesday would not be possible were it not for a strategy that he adamantly opposed. When Bush announced the surge in January 2007, then-Sen. Obama not only fought the increase in troops, he opposed on more than one occasion the underlying approach (already in practice in Iraq) that the new troops were being sent to pursue.

Sen. Obama not only expected the surge to fail; he saw it, incorrectly, as yet another example of Bush's inability to adapt to reality. President Obama, at least, does not face that criticism. He has based his strategy in Afghanistan on the same counterinsurgency strategy that was central to Bush's surge. He's done more than borrow his predecessor's strategy--he's also borrowing his language. Of these two quotes, which is Obama and which is Bush?

A) "If I didn't think that it was important for our national security to finish the job ... then I would pull them out today, because I have to sign letters to these families who have lost loved ones."

B) "If we can't win, I'll pull us out. ... I'm not going to keep those kids in there and have to deal with their loved ones."

Yet if Bush's reputation benefits from his successor's response to some similar challenges, it may "have to deal," as he put it above, with a bigger blow in others. Once we get through the current economic mess, historians may find new reasons to blame Bush (and Clinton, for that matter). Similarly, history may not treat critics of Obama's stimulus kindly.

Perspective has a tendency to be apolitical. If a current president's challenges give him a new appreciation of the challenges faced by his predecessor, then a president's supporters should be open to the possibility that their guy isn't always right, and that the previous guy wasn't always wrong. (Just as opponents of the current president should consider the possibility that he isn't always wrong and his predecessor wasn't always right.) So when someone like Ben Quayle declares Obama "the worst president in history," the misreading of history and lack of context should cause us all to laugh at him--Bush supporters hardest among us.

John Dickerson is a CBS News political analyst. He is also Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. You can also follow him on Twitter here.

John Dickerson
John Dickerson is CBS News' political director. He is also Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail.
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by DUMBnEASY May 5, 2011 6:13 PM EDT

My how we can rewrite history. Gov. of LA., Mary Landrieu, and New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagan was more culpable and responsible for the slow repsponse to Katrina than Bush ever was. Go to the first Bush labeled stimulus and we find Obama already elected President and calling on Bush to approve the measure. Ain't it grand to brand your predecessor the problem when you make the plea without shouldering the burden?

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by PhelpsRU1 May 6, 2011 2:21 AM EDT: TIME MAGAZINE
N O T E B O O K
Letting Up On Osama
Special forces previously in Afghanistan are moved out to Iraq
By MICHAEL DUFFY AND MASSIMO CALABRESI

Monday, Aug. 04, 2003

George W. Bush hadn't mentioned Osama bin Laden's name in months, but he said recently that the U.S. was "slowly but surely" dismantling bin Laden's terrorist operation. As the hunt for Saddam Hussein intensifies, some U.S. officials are suggesting that the focus on the former leader of Iraq has come at the cost of eliminating the eccentric Saudi millionaire behind the 9/11 attacks.

For nearly two years, bin Laden has been on the run in isolated parts of Afghanistan and eastern Pakistan, U.S. officials believe, staying out of sight, relying on the help of local tribes and traveling only in very small groups of devoted followers. Last fall, as the U.S. began planning the invasion of Iraq, Washington shifted many of its highly classified special-forces units and officers who had been hunting bin Laden in Afghanistan, moving them to Iraq, where they performed covert operations before the war began. By December many of the 800 special-forces personnel who had been chasing al-Qaeda for a year were quietly brought back home, given a few weeks' rest and then shipped out to Iraq. "They all basically picked up and moved," says a senior U.S. official. When the A-team members left, they took a lot of their high-tech equipment (and Arabic speakers) with them. And while they were replaced by fresh troops, many of the new units comprise reservists who, rather than specializing in countering Islamic threats, were trained for operations in Russian-and Spanish-speaking countries.

The Administration was warned by skeptics inside the government that the switch-out would take some of the pressure off al-Qaeda, but the impending war with Iraq - which emphasized special forces as no war plan ever did before - took precedence over all other issues last winter at the Pentagon. Now some have come to believe that the change in emphasis allowed bin Laden to disperse to other parts of the world operatives who survived the initial months on the run. "The reason these guys were able to get away," says a former Bush official, "was because we let up."

From the Aug. 11, 2003 issue of TIME magazine


by sb384 May 6, 2011 3:52 AM EDT: dumbneasy, evidently rewriting history has become the bush administration's goal. The problem they are having is that 'facts' keep getting in the way. As you can see at http://www.thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline Louisiana local and State officials followed their guidelines and the protocol of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Once the City and State's assets were overwhelmed...Feds were 'supposed' to accelerate assistance--especially since all Federal assets had been promised by bush, chertoff through their appointee--michael 'heckvajob'brownie to the Governor of the State of Louisiana. Further, once Chertoff activated the National Response Plan declaring Katrina an Incident of National Significance--not only allowed the Feds to respond w/o any further requests from Gov. Blanco but from my understanding, took the response out of local and State and placed it 100% in Federal control. Thereby the four (4) day delay in federal response especially to a City that was 80% flooded from the failure of the federally controlled levee system made the bush administration fully culpable and fully responsible.

by starving1968-3 September 1, 2010 1:00 PM EDT

Cleaning Up Bush's Messes Tour--what many Democrats would call the entire Obama presidency so far.

Couldn't be described better.

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by PhelpsRU1 May 6, 2011 2:50 AM EDT: Two words: 'Bush Knew.'

It is, frankly, amazing that this has fallen down the memory hole. Recall two headlines from that period. The first, from the UK Guardian on May 19, 2002, was titled 'Bush Knew of Terrorist Plot to Hijack US Planes.' The first three paragraphs of this story read:

"George Bush received specific warnings in the weeks before 11 September that an attack inside the United States was being planned by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, US government sources said yesterday. In a top-secret intelligence memo headlined 'Bin Laden determined to strike in the US', the President was told on 6 August that the Saudi-born terrorist hoped to 'bring the fight to America' in retaliation for missile strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998. Bush and his aides, who are facing withering criticism for failing to act on a series of warnings, have previously said intelligence experts had not advised them domestic targets were considered at risk. However, they have admitted they were specifically told that hijacks were being planned."

Another story on the topic came from the New York Times on May 15, 2002, and was titled 'Bush Was Warned bin Laden Wanted to Hijack Planes.'

Unlike the Guardian piece, the Times chose to lead the article with the Bush administration's cover story; one the administration has stuck with to this day:

"The Bush White House said that President Bush had been warned by American intelligence agencies in early August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft but that the warnings did not contemplate the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles for a terrorist attack. 'It is widely known that we had information that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States or United States interests abroad,' Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said this evening. 'The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9/11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile.'"


by PhelpsRU1 May 6, 2011 2:54 AM EDT: Yes, we were warned, said the Bush administration, but who could have conceived of terrorists using airplanes for suicide bombings?

A lot of people, actually.

For example, in 1993, a $150,000 study was commissioned by the Pentagon to investigate the possibility of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. A draft document of this was circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice Department and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee broke into the cockpit of a DC-10 with plans to crash it into a company building in Memphis.

That same year, a lone pilot crashed a small plane into a tree on the White House grounds, narrowly missing the residence. An Air France flight was hijacked by members of the Armed Islamic Group, which intended to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. In September 1999, a report titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism" was prepared for U.S. intelligence by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the Library of Congress. It stated, "Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded the Bush government with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets, including commercial aircraft, by al Qaeda and other groups. A July 5, 2001 White House gathering of the FAA, the Coast Guard, the FBI, Secret Service and INS had a top counter-terrorism official, Richard Clarke, state that "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon." Donald Kerrick, who is a three-star general, was a deputy National Security Advisor in the late Clinton administration. He stayed on into the Bush administration. When the Bush administration came in, he wrote a memo about terrorism, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The memo said, "We will be struck again." As a result of writing that memo, he was not invited to any more meetings.

In a late November interview, former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal said, "Richard Clarke was Director of Counter-Terrorism in the National Security Council. He has since left. Clark urgently tried to draw the attention of the Bush administration to the threat of al Qaeda. Right at the present, the Bush administration is trying to withhold documents from the 9/11 bipartisan commission. I believe one of the things that they do not want to be known is what happened on August 6, 2001. It was on that day that George W. Bush received his last, and one of the few, briefings on terrorism. I believe he told Richard Clarke that he didn't want to be briefed on this again, even though Clarke was panicked about the alarms he was hearing regarding potential attacks. Bush was blithe, indifferent, ultimately irresponsible."

Never mind the final insult: They received all these warnings and went on vacation for a month down in Texas. The August 6 briefing might as well have happened in a vacuum. September 11 could have and should have been prevented. Whycy has done." ? Because Bush knew.

by run2jazz2 September 1, 2010 10:16 AM EDT

If President Bush was such an icon why did he not get invited to the Republican convention for President? They did not have nothing of Bush.

Not a Button, banner, pencil, cup, T-shirt, beer cover, door mat or anything refering to him in Vader Cheney. Republicans were naive and tried to negate the things that were going on in the country as people were being "Unpatriotic" towards him.

The truth was he and the other "Geniuses" like Karl Rowe, Scooter Libby are lucky their narrow rear ends are not sitting in a federal pen.

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by PhelpsRU1 May 6, 2011 3:00 AM EDT: "Job growth, which stagnated during the Bush Administration , has been vigorous under President Clinton." Washington Post, 5/4/96.


by love2ridend September 1, 2010 8:21 AM EDT: So the great economy we had in the Clinton years were because of Bush Sr. correct? You cant have it both ways.; Reply to this comment


by formrusmcsgt August 31, 2010 10:40 PM EDT: by thy-one-king August 31, 2010 7:27 PM EDT
mike, you can't change history.
Bush had the highest approval
rating of any president in the
history of the U.S.
---
And had the record lowest when he left office....you always forget to include that part.

Wonder why?; Reply to this comment


by formrusmcsgt August 31, 2010 10:38 PM EDT: Cleaning Up Bush's Messes Tour
----
Best description I've head yet.....; Reply to this comment


by babooph August 31, 2010 8:05 PM EDT: Improved Bush legacy gets better-is this one of their miracles,or one of their delusions?; Reply to this comment

by mikelpond August 31, 2010 7:24 PM EDT

No, the Bush legacy is a bad as ever. What you're basing this on is just some poll you took. In 50 years, Bush will be ranked in the bottom 10 Presidents ever. You're poll can't re-write history and niether can a few individuals that don't want change.

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by oneday1 August 31, 2010 7:49 PM EDT: Thank you Skyk1! He had both the lowest and the highest so at BEST he's average lol.


by voxpopulus August 31, 2010 7:50 PM EDT: He also had pretty much the lowest.


by kuku22-2009 August 31, 2010 6:55 PM EDT: It's becoming clear that the falsified source of good information about Obama is the same falsified source of bad information about Bush.
Those that believed both were quite a gullible group, that blindly believed things after checking in their brains. wow. We're describing religious kool-aid drinking nutcakes...; Reply to this comment