President Bush is not useless

Written by Todd Frary, Columnist
Tuesday, 25 March 2008

I never thought I’d find myself praising President Bush or anything he’s done, but as I’ve learned we heal through pain, so here goes.

Thanks to his ill-advised invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, we have painfully learned the limits of military power. Future administrations will hopefully rely more on diplomatic and economic pressure before resorting to such drastic and intemperate means of resolving problems that displease us. Iraq has hopefully disabused Americans from getting involved in nation building; something Bush opposed himself when running for President in 2000. Almost one trillion dollars later we’re also hopefully learning the economic lesson for trying to impose our will on other nations. That’s a bill we will be paying for decades to come.

Thank you also President Bush for pointing out the wisdom of building coalitions with our allies. Your father did that masterfully in the run-up to the First Gulf War and so did many of your predecessors in their times of crisis. Your “go it alone” mentality has truly exposed the limits of our military as they endure repeated and extended deployments, stop loss orders, and the like. Hopefully your successor will be able to rebuild coalitions to resolve other problems such as North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere. Yes, assembling coalitions is “hard work,” a favorite phrase of yours, but ultimately those coalitions pay dividends. One of your predecessors put it best when he said “trust but verify.” It is clear you have trust issues, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and work with nations and leaders you distrust while keeping your powder dry.

With the Executive and Legislative branches at gridlock on legislation we come to another point: thank you for teaching us the importance of compromise. It would have been nice to strike some deal on privatizing some Social Security contributions, but your foolish all-or-nothing gambit slammed shut the door on even the smallest bit of experimentation. Ditto for legislation on stem cell research, extensions of visas for specific foreign workers, and a raft of other issues most Americans supported. I’m guessing your successor will be far more interested in rolling up his or her sleeves and getting to work rather than clearing brush at their ranch in Texas.

And there’s still more. Your laissez faire approach towards business has allowed unprecedented conglomerations to emerge in communications and media, tainted food, drugs and toys to enter our nation and poison us, and weak oversight of the financial markets led to the sub-prime meltdown which is now pulling down the investment community with it. In a desperate bid to ensure liquidity, the market has been flooded with currency as the printing presses run, driving the dollar to record lows against world currencies and threatening inflation while creating massive deficits. The growing lack of confidence in America as a safe place to invest as well as questioning our business acumen is probably the worst damage and the most surprising from someone who has an MBA from YaleB-School-Isnt-What-It-Used-To-Be University. How the next President undoes all of what has happened with our finances and business oversight is a tough issue to resolve. Again, healing will come with pain and it will take considerable time, effort and the right set of economic circumstances to undo it all.

You can learn as much from bad leadership examples as you can from good examples. Our nation has been blessed with extraordinary leaders at times of gravest crisis: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet for every Lincoln there was a Buchanan who ignored addressing a serious issue facing our nation. Worse still were Harding and Coolidge who impassively sat idly by allowing the seeds of the Great Depression to be sown and flourish. Yet we’ve learned a great deal from the errors of Buchanan, Harding, and Coolidge. Bush likes to say he’ll let history be his judge. I have a sense of where it will fall already.