Kenneth T. Walsh: Looking Back on President George W. Bush's Troubled Presidency
It wasn't supposed to end like this. Not for George W. Bush, the inveterate optimist who thought his presidency would somehow conclude on a high note despite his abysmal job-approval ratings and his unpopular policies. As recently as September, he told friends of his confidence that positive news out of Iraq, where a surge in U.S. troops had helped quell rampant violence, would soon dominate the headlines and give him a PR lift. Instead, the media today are focusing on the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession—and many are blaming him for the crisis.
Faced with these disappointments, Bush has gotten introspective in his final days, a tendency he resisted for eight years when he was known for strut and swagger. In the beginning, when Ari Fleischer, his first White House press secretary, would bring him queries from reporters asking how he felt about some news development, Bush would dismiss them as "goo-goo questions." Now Bush welcomes such detours as he tries to humanize himself and encourage the public, the media, and historians to give him more credit as they assess his legacy.
He finally admits that his low standing in the polls does bother him. "Everybody wants to be liked," the normally thick-skinned president told a December 1 forum on global health. He concedes that many voters backed Democrat Barack Obama on Election Day as a protest against the Bush years. He admits to frustration with his big setbacks, especially the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was one of his main reasons for going to war there. Similarly, he is disappointed by the failure of Congress to pass his measures to overhaul immigration and Social Security, and he is distressed by the soaring level of federal spending and the continuing partisan warfare in Washington. In a gesture of conciliation (which his Democratic critics say he withheld for most of his presidency), he has ordered his aides to be gracious and helpful to the new president and his staff, even though Obama was a merciless critic of Bush throughout the campaign.
At times, Bush has turned unusually personal, bordering on melancholy. "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process," Bush told his sister, Doro Bush Koch, in a recent interview for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. "I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values, and I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a president that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them."...
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Faced with these disappointments, Bush has gotten introspective in his final days, a tendency he resisted for eight years when he was known for strut and swagger. In the beginning, when Ari Fleischer, his first White House press secretary, would bring him queries from reporters asking how he felt about some news development, Bush would dismiss them as "goo-goo questions." Now Bush welcomes such detours as he tries to humanize himself and encourage the public, the media, and historians to give him more credit as they assess his legacy.
He finally admits that his low standing in the polls does bother him. "Everybody wants to be liked," the normally thick-skinned president told a December 1 forum on global health. He concedes that many voters backed Democrat Barack Obama on Election Day as a protest against the Bush years. He admits to frustration with his big setbacks, especially the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was one of his main reasons for going to war there. Similarly, he is disappointed by the failure of Congress to pass his measures to overhaul immigration and Social Security, and he is distressed by the soaring level of federal spending and the continuing partisan warfare in Washington. In a gesture of conciliation (which his Democratic critics say he withheld for most of his presidency), he has ordered his aides to be gracious and helpful to the new president and his staff, even though Obama was a merciless critic of Bush throughout the campaign.
At times, Bush has turned unusually personal, bordering on melancholy. "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process," Bush told his sister, Doro Bush Koch, in a recent interview for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. "I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values, and I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a president that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them."...