Dubya Down

Joseph Bottum and Michael Novak debate the President's failings over at First Things.

I agree with Bottum's take, particularly this:

Apart from the still not certain pro-life views of the two new Supreme Court justices, where is there a major success to which one can point? In the opening days of his presidency, Bush declared that the return of government support for faith-based institutions would be the great legacy of his administration-as well it might have been, if the whole thing had not quickly collapsed into a clown show of political missteps, fumbled chances, and administrative infighting so vicious that the director of the faith-based office eventually took to the pages of Vanity Fair to denounce his co-workers as a bunch of “Mayberry Machiavellians.”

Stem cells are perhaps the exception, for there President Bush did indeed hold the conservative line. It is worth remembering, however, the way in which he did so: letting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research become a public crisis when quicker action would have kept it off center stage. By allowing it to boil over, the administration allowed its opponents to shift the focus off abortion, where the pro-life movement seemed to be gradually winning, and onto embryonic stem cells, where the nation has yet to be convinced. There’s a reason the word abortion was never spoken from the podium of the 2004 Democratic convention, while the phrase stem cells was trumpeted dozens of times. Correct action, even when strongly undertaken, is not the same thing as persuasive leadership.

Regardless, little else comes to mind. President Bush was absolutely right that social security is a looming disaster, and as a result of his efforts, social-security reform is now dead for a generation. The White House saw clearly that education in this country needs a complete overhaul, and we got as a consequence only the bureaucratic annoyance of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Republicans’ lack of political savvy abandoned an astonishing number of unconfirmed judicial nominees-and now we have a Democratic Senate unlikely to confirm any conservative judges at all.

And this:

The reason is President Bush. His administration has mishandled the logistics of the war and the politics of its perception in nearly equal measure, from Abu Ghraib to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Conservatives voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because they expected him to be the opposite of Bill Clinton-and so, unfortunately, he has proved. Where Clinton seemed a man of enormous political competence and no principle, Bush has been a man of principle and very little political competence. The security concerns after the attacks of September 11 and the general tide of American conservatism carried Republicans through the elections of 2002 and 2004. But by 2006 Bush had squandered his party’s advantages, until even the specter of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House was not enough to keep the Republicans in power.

To abandon Iraq now would be the height of irresponsibility. It would lock in place the perception of defeat, with all the predictable consequences, and it would abandon the Iraqis to whom we promised freedom and democracy. President Bush has clearly done the right thing in refusing retreat and pledging to stay the course in Iraq.

But hasn’t that always been the problem? Again and again, he has done the right thing in the wrong way, until, at last, his wrongness has overwhelmed his rightness. How can conservatives continue to support this man in much of anything he tries to do? Iraq is not America’s failure, and it is not conservatism’s failure. We are where we are because of George W. Bush’s failure.

Given all this, right now I'd have to rank Presidents since Kennedy in the following order, best to worst:

Reagan
Bush I
Bush II
Ford
Johnson
Clinton
Nixon
Carter

I'd fully expected George W. Bush to exceed his father in office, but Bush the Elder's one term with its single-handed restoration of military confidence that was the Panama invasion and Desert Storm sure looks strong in comparison.

If Dubya's last two years are worse than his first 6, he's in danger of dropping lower than LBJ, an amazing feat given the latter's disastrous micro- and mis-management of the Vietnam War and the Great Society garbage we're still digging out from today.

Dubya would have to go quite far to be a bigger sleaze than Clinton or Nixon or as big a catastrophe as Carter, who set the nation back a full decade.