By Staff
According to the Treasury Department, the 42 presidents who occupied the White House between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions.
The Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion between 2001 and 2005 alone.
Yup, more than all previous chief executives combined.
George W. Bush inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001 and turned it into the largest deficit ever, with $423 billion of red ink forecast for fiscal year 2006.
No wonder he's being compared to Herbert Hoover who, running for president in 1928, declared that American was closer to “the final triumph over poverty of any land.” A year later the stock market crashed and plunged America into the Depression. Hoover kept insisting that “prosperity is just around the corner,” but actually it was a landslide loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Bush is also being compared to James Buchanan, who left the country more divided and acrimonious than he found it; Andrew Johnson, whose efforts during Civil War Reconstruction after Abraham Lincoln's assassination are reminiscent of the rebuilding of Iraq; and James Polk for allegedly manufacturing war with Mexico.
Only one president elected twice has seen his ratings plummet as low as Bush's in his second term - Richard Nixon, months before his 1974 resignation during Watergate.
In 2004, a survey of 415 historians by the non-partisan History News Network found 81 percent of these scholars already regarded the Bush administration as a “failure.”
Keep in mind that this assessment came before Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and subsequent developments in Iraq.
Remember when Bush enjoyed the highest approval ratings ever recorded, in the neighborhood of 90 percent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001?
The term “credibility gap” has been applied recently to Bush.
I had not heard it in more than 40 years, when it described Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and the distance between what a president professes and the public perception of reality.
Remember when listening to Walter Cronkite persuaded LBJ not to seek re-election? His Gallup Poll disapproval rating was “only” 52 percent in March 1968. We recently celebrated the third anniversary of “mission accomplished” in Iraq.
Historians hold no hope for a Bush reversal a la Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton because he resists acknowledging mistakes, his resolute style that adheres to simplistic ideology and leaves no room for pragmatic course change.
Still, Andrew Card has been replaced by Joshua Bolten, Tony Snow spelled Scott McClellan and now Porter Goss is out at the CIA.
Bush was plagued by low ratings before 9/11, which thrust upon him a second chance to achieve greatness. But “Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership,” in the assessment of Princeton University American history professor Sean Wilentz writing in the May 4 Rolling Stone. “No other president - Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War - faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies - including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security.”
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plotted the shift from al Qaeda to toppling Saddam Hussein.
We were handed the Bush Doctrine justifying unprovoked war, which previous foreign policy makers rejected. And we're back to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith in bogus tax cuts that the president's father recognized as “voodoo economics.”
Job growth is chiefly attributable to increased federal spending - particularly on defense.
Real wages for middle America have eroded since the end of 2003. Last year, on average, wages grew by 2.4 percent. Gains were erased by 3.4-percent inflation.
Republican strategist Kevin Phillips credits Bush with turning the GOP into the “first religious party in U.S. history.”
White House disdain for science contributed to global warming as well as the catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina.
Reagan has somehow been recast by a wave of nostalgia into a paragon of virtue, but I remember him presiding over the most corrupt modern administration apart from Nixon's.
How soon we forget that 29 Reagan figures, including national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted of Iran-Contra charges, illegal lobbying and looting the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Three Cabinet members, HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, were driven out by scandal.
By contrast, no one in the Clinton administration was indicted over White House duties, despite Ken Starr's high-profile investigations and a partisan impeachment quest.
Bush, thanks to a majority in Congress, has been spared much scrutiny, although Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, has been indicted. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff's six-year sentence implicated some other prominent Republicans and could yet result in the largest corruption scandal in U.S. history.
History's greatest contempt could be reserved, however, for Bush expanding the Oval Office's reach beyond the bounds of the Constitution.
Checks and balances don't work very well when one branch thinks it should hold all the power.
This administration goes so far as to assert that this wartime president can freely violate federal laws on domestic surveillance and torturing detainees.