WE have Franklin Roosevelt to thank for the idea that US presidents should do important things in 100 day increments. He started in 1933 with a burst of legislation that still shapes US politics today. If FDR began with a Great Depression, George W Bush looks likely to end with one, and to spend his last 100 days fighting to limit the damage to the US, the world, and his own reputation.
Regardless of how sensible his policies are – and he has led with considerably more vigour than the sluggardly European responses – there is nothing Bush can do in his last 100 days to change the narrative. His reputation has for now passed beyond ra
tional thought.
A story that circulated in the early 1930s had a man biting into an apple, finding a worm, and exclaiming: "Damn Herbert Hoover!" Bush can identify. Everyone now knows that he is a relentless unilateralist and a partisan of unfettered deregulation, and no considerations of reality are going to change those beliefs.
It's curious, though, how cycles of reputation work, especially for Republican presidents. When Eisenhower left office in 1960, he was widely considered to be more interested in golf than the duties of state. Only in the 1980s did we learn that Ike ran a
"hidden hand" presidency: like or dislike his policies, they were indeed his.
The same thing has happened with every Republican president since: they leave under a cloud, or accompanied by the disdain of the intelligentsia, only for the next generation to discover how much they got right. Watergate was inexcusable, but liberals like Barack Obama have a curious affinity for Richard Nixon, who was a realist in foreign policy and a believer in the massive expansion of government at home.
Ronald Reagan is now widely regarded as a national hero: only the ignorant now believe, as was commonly said in the 1980s, that he blundered thoughtlessly into and out of the Oval Office. And George HW Bush, defeated after a single term in 1992, now looks like Nixon without the scandals. As realism comes back into vogue in Washington, his reputation will certainly rise.
Why do Republicans look better in retrospect than they do at the time? Nixon's answer was to the point: "Liberals write the histories". You could complicate that a bit. The US and Britain have a tradition of popular conservatism, which commentators in Europe are both ignorant about and afraid of. And since the mission of liberals in the US and Britain since the 1960s has been to make both countries European,
it's not surprising that they don't get it either.
If the financial crisis does turn into a depression, all the reassessments in the world won't restore Bush's reputation. It may not have been fully his fault, but it happened on his watch, and that will cling to him forever. Iraq may end as a success, but there's no way a depression is anything but bad news. But if, with a lot of leadership and a bit of luck, we get through this, the normal cycle of reputation will run its course.
And it won't take long, for the conventional wisdom about Bush is badly askew. Everyone knows, for instance, that Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol. Except that's not true: that happened in 1997, when the Senate, led by the Democrats, refused by a vote of 95-0 to consider it. So a lot of liberals running on their perfect records on fighting global warming are running on lies.
And everyone knows that Bush rejected the International Criminal Court. Except that, again, it was Bill Clinton who refused to even submit the treaty to the Senate, because he knew he'd lose. Yes, absolutely, Bush dislikes both Kyoto and the ICC. So do most American Democrats – and, given Europe's failure to reduce its carbon emissions, most Europeans evidently agree with them about Kyoto. The only difference is that Bush has been honest about it.
Or take the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The US opted out – as was its right – in 2002. This was widely criticised as another piece of US unilateralism. Yet in April 2008, all 26 NATO nations formally endorsed the Bush Administration's missile defence plans, which could not have proceeded without the opt-out. So who was right? The critics in 2002, or the 26 democracies today?
Bush's successes have been unilateral. His failures have been multilateral. And since 2003, his administration has been exceptionally multilateral. They've followed the path of the Six Party Talks with North Korea, which is continuing to test missiles and has returned to pursuing its nuclear programme. They encouraged Europe to take the lead on Iran's nuclear programme, with the result that nothing whatsoever has been achieved.
They have allowed Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to linger unmolested, as he's developed alliances with Iran and Russia. They have yelled about the on-going genocide in Darfur, but have subcontracted stopping it to an incapable African Union force and a European one that stays safely behind the front lines.
Because their allies were hesitant, they didn't press hard for Georgia to be given a fast path into NATO: Russia took the hint. And they have brought NATO into the fight in Afghanistan, only to find that
most European nations are unwilling or unable to do much of use on the front lines.
And deregulation? Please. It was Clinton who in 1999 carried out the major deregulation of banks in the US. By every measure, Bush's administrations have overseen a massive increase in federal regulation. Money spent by federal regulatory agencies is up to $44.9bn in 2007 from $27bn in 2001, a 44 per cent increase. And Bush has brought the federal government into areas like education in a big way for the first time.
Nor did Bush do much – and Senator McCain's efforts were blocked by the Democrats – about the corrupt, government-sponsored, duopoly of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who ran and ruined the mortgage market. That duopoly, by the way, rose to power on the back of Clinton's authority in the mid-1990s, when he re-wrote their rules to force them to give more mortgages to minority buyers who couldn't afford the payments.
That sums up Bush's dilemma in the last 100 days. When he's lived on Clinton's legacy at home, or multilateralism abroad, he's failed, but liberals have given him no credit for trying and conservatives dislike the effort. When he's led, he's succeeded, but liberals are allergic to US leadership if it involves more than words.
Now, the financial crisis has given him one final chance, the same chance, strangely, that Clinton had, and muffed, during the internet stock market bubble: an opportunity to exercise American economic leadership. It won't save him now. But it might save us now, and him later.
Ted Bromund is an American political commentator The full article contains 1172 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
