Michael Tomasky: George W Bush's Decision Points towards rehabilitation
[Michael Tomasky is editor-in-chief of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.]
The exit polls from last week's midterm elections – those venerated scrolls that tell us why Americans voted as they did and what they think of the state of the nation – contained continuing bad news for poor George W Bush, now out of office two years and, for the most part, impressively silent. One question asked voters whom they blamed for the economic collapse. While the No 1 answer was Wall Street at 35%, the second spot was occupied not by Barack Obama, but by Bush, at 29%. Obama was the culprit for 24%.
Bush left office with fewer Americans supporting his job performance (around 25%) than still blame him now for the wrecked economy. These days, he is a retired multimillionaire – he received a $7m advance for this book (exactly the same, interestingly, as Keith Richards) – who doesn't need to do anything else as long as he lives. But surely, he doesn't want to go down in American history as one of the worst presidents ever.
Enter Decision Points, his new book, which can be read as the starting point of a rehabilitation process.
The Bush of Decision Points is a humbler and more measured man than the actual president many Americans remember. That would be the man who, when asked at one 2004 press conference (as mayhem raged in Iraq) if he'd made any mistakes or regretted any decisions, couldn't come up with one. But today, in his first major interview for the book, Bush told a top American television presenter that he was "a dissenting voice" on war with Iraq...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
The exit polls from last week's midterm elections – those venerated scrolls that tell us why Americans voted as they did and what they think of the state of the nation – contained continuing bad news for poor George W Bush, now out of office two years and, for the most part, impressively silent. One question asked voters whom they blamed for the economic collapse. While the No 1 answer was Wall Street at 35%, the second spot was occupied not by Barack Obama, but by Bush, at 29%. Obama was the culprit for 24%.
Bush left office with fewer Americans supporting his job performance (around 25%) than still blame him now for the wrecked economy. These days, he is a retired multimillionaire – he received a $7m advance for this book (exactly the same, interestingly, as Keith Richards) – who doesn't need to do anything else as long as he lives. But surely, he doesn't want to go down in American history as one of the worst presidents ever.
Enter Decision Points, his new book, which can be read as the starting point of a rehabilitation process.
The Bush of Decision Points is a humbler and more measured man than the actual president many Americans remember. That would be the man who, when asked at one 2004 press conference (as mayhem raged in Iraq) if he'd made any mistakes or regretted any decisions, couldn't come up with one. But today, in his first major interview for the book, Bush told a top American television presenter that he was "a dissenting voice" on war with Iraq...