PRESIDENTS DAY

When I was a kid in Philadelphia, we celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday, and we had pictures of them up on the classroom walls and we heard about the Emancipation Proclamation and the cherry tree and all, and of course, we had two days off from school. It seemed a little odd that you had two days off from school so close together, but I certainly didn’t object. And they were great presidents, so it made sense. Even though kids in the South didn’t have Lincoln’s Birthday off, they got Robert E. Lee’s Birthday (January 19) instead, so that seemed fair too.

Presidents Day is another matter. I mean, it’s just so vague and unfocused. And let’s face it, there are plenty of presidents who don’t deserve to be celebrated. What about Nixon, for example? There are still people around who will defend Nixon, and who like him, but there aren’t a lot of them, and I doubt even they would argue he was the sort of unblemished hero who deserves to have a holiday honoring him. Then there’s Woodrow Wilson, who segregated Washington D.C. and the federal civil service and then, for a sort of encore, instituted a fascist police state in America that we have never seen before or since. And, of course, there was Jimmy Carter, the man who brought us 20% mortgage rates, gave away the Panama Canal, ushered in the theocracy in Iran, almost destroyed the Olympics, and is primarily known today (in his dotage) for his unapologetic anti-Semitism.

There are some genuinely uncelebrate-able men who have been elected President of the United States. You may disagree with me on who they are, but I doubt there is much argument on this basic point. So there’s not much to like about Presidents Day.

But there is one thing. Occasionally, on Presidents Day, a discussion will break out on who our great presidents were, and who was not so hot, and who was a sociopath, and who was underrated, and who should have gone to jail, and so on. And for recent presidents, about whom “history” has not yet spoken, this can be an interesting and spirited discussion.

I had such a discussion this past Presidents Day concerning George W. Bush.

Most lefties, of course, continue to view George Bush as an amalgam incorporating the worst character traits of Forrest Gump and Vlad the Impaler, and the odd psychological phenomenon called Bush Derangement Syndrome survives unabated, at least in the minds of that dwindling number of citizens who still have no reservations whatsoever about Barack Obama and his vision for America. Since Obama himself rarely misses an opportunity to remind us that everything wrong with the world is Bush’s fault, it’s not surprising that his minions feel the same way. This, in a nutshell, was the view of the left-winger I was chatting with. She felt, as many do, that Bush had to be put in a special category of loathsomeness in the pantheon of presidents and that simply calling him “the worst president ever” was, to some extent, gilding the lily.

Stepping back a bit, however, and trying to imagine what Bush will look like in fifty or sixty or a hundred years, I think the first thing you have to do is throw the BDS hatred out the window. The next thing you do is look back into our history and try to find other presidents you can compare him to. The analysis is incomplete, of course, because while we may know what Bush did while in office, we cannot know whether certain seeds he planted will bear fruit.

Think of Thomas Jefferson, for example. When his term ended in 1809, there were plenty of folks around who still thought the Louisiana Purchase was kind of dopey. It was only with the passage of time (and it was quite a bit of time) that the sea-to-shining-sea idea really caught on and became a source of pride and even an important piece of our national identity.

More recently, when Ronald Reagan left office, no one had any clue that his efforts would be instrumental in bringing down the Soviet empire because no one knew the Soviet empire would collapse less than three years later. Those who hated Reagan denied, and still deny, he deserves any credit for winning the Cold War, but as the years go by, it seems pretty clear the Reagan-haters are losing that historical argument. For other reasons as well, Reagan’s stature continues to grow. Emotional reactions that seemed so important at the time tend to fade into the fog of history, and as a result, other events in a presidency will stand out more boldly. Only with the passage of time will the picture come into focus.

For some presidents, it doesn’t take very long. If a man leaves no great ideas and institutes no nation-changing programs, there is no real legacy to his presidency. And once the adulation (of some) and the hatred (of others) has melted away, he is revealed as no more than a caretaker.

That was Bill Clinton. The people who hated him don’t hate him as much and the people who adored him don’t adore him as much either. And once you get past the emotions, you realize there wasn’t much else. He produced no grand programs or initiatives, he didn’t win or lose any big wars, and he never even made a memorable speech. He presided over a booming economy that crashed at the end of his term, and he wasn’t really responsible for either the boom or the crash. In 2030, there is nothing that might happen where people will say, “Ah, yes---that was Bill Clinton’s idea. He started the whole thing rolling.” Our view of Clinton today probably won’t change much in fifty or a hundred years.

But George Bush? Well, he is almost impossible to evaluate, and it may be decades before we can rationally assess his place in history. It has only been fourteen months since he left office, of course, but there are presidents whose place in history is settled on the day they climb into the whirlybird and leave town. Clinton was one; Eisenhower was another. Gerry Ford was such a president also. It doesn’t mean they are bad men, or bad presidents. All it means is that they launched no canoes into the stream of world history, so we don’t have to wait around to see where those canoes eventually land.

In arriving at a verdict on George Bush now, in 2010, the best we can do is identify a range of where he might wind up in the history books. So let’s start with the minimum. What, exactly, is the Bush minimum? What, in comparison to other presidents, is the lowest level to which he may be consigned by the judgment of historians a hundred years from now?

This is the easy part. Bush was very much an accidental president. Not only did he take office with fewer popular votes than his Democratic opponent, but the only reason he became president at all was that an electoral nobody named Ralph Nader siphoned enough votes from Bush’s opponent to give Bush a narrow win in Florida and a victory in the Electoral College.

Once he had won, the very last thing he wanted or expected was that he would become a wartime president in a hideous worldwide clash of cultures that may last fifty years. He had wanted to be a “compassionate conservative,” cutting taxes and improving schools and giving free medicine to geezers. Then came 9-11-2001.

The obvious parallel is to another president who was thrust into office unexpectedly and who, five months later, had to decide whether to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Like Bush, Harry Truman had to make some difficult (and often thankless) choices, but he was the president, so he made them. And Truman, like Bush, ended his term with most of the American people glad to see him go. Truman too was a hated man at the end.

Today, Harry Truman doesn’t look nearly as bad or foolish or feckless as he did in 1952, and I expect the same grudging admiration will emerge for Bush as the years go by. At a minimum, Bush will be regarded as Truman is now---as a president who was thrust into a situation he didn’t choose, with decisions to make that would never please everybody, but who managed through the force of his will and his essential values to shepherd the country past the abyss.

But if Harry Truman is the minimum, what is the maximum? For Bush, this is the hard part.

Bush’s legacy will depend largely on what happens in the Middle East over the next twenty or forty years. The region is filled with brutal, misogynist dictatorships, but there are nascent democracy movements in every one of them, and if Iraq can survive as at least a quasi-secular democracy, the pressure will build to end the strongman regimes that dominate the political culture. The rosiest scenario is that the despots will begin to fall like dominoes once the Iranian theocracy crashes, as it certainly will.

The scent of freedom in the Middle East (and I’m not suggesting it is much more than that) would not exist if George Bush had never been president. Among other things, by ousting Saddam and removing the Taliban from power, George Bush did more for the welfare and status of women in the world than any person in history. If democratic movements grow, and succeed in bringing the Middle East into the modern world, there is no question Bush will be given credit for having the vision and the will to set the process in motion.

Of course, it is possible that Obama and future presidents will simply drop the ball and let the region slide back into the Dark Ages. It is also possible that Arab culture is still hundreds of years away from abandoning its chiefdom and tribal systems to become modern nations, and Bush was foolish to think otherwise. If that happens, all of Bush’s efforts there will have been useless.

If, however, the monsters are deposed and democratic institutions like a free press and a rule of law develop, and the veil is cast aside, Bush’s accomplishment will be viewed as even more miraculous and wonderful than Reagan’s. The Soviet Union, after all, shared many of our values. There was at least a basis for communication. For example, they responded to threats because, at some fundamental level, they valued life and wanted to live and prosper. When Reagan called them the Evil Empire, they knew what it meant and they didn’t like it. Bringing down the Soviet Union was easy compared to changing the Middle East.

It’s not impossible. Maybe it’s not likely, but it’s not impossible. And if the transformation of Arab despotism into something like freedom turns out to be Bush’s legacy, then his achievement would be celebrated for centuries. The “upside” for Bush, the potential upside for his ultimate place in history, is that he may be viewed, alongside Abraham Lincoln, as a great liberator.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki