A new America emerging

Six-block lines, Arctic weather, packed trains -- none of it mattered. We can believe in our country again.

Garrison Keillor

salon.com

January 21, 2009

One simply wanted to be present. Freezing cold or not, a crowd of 2 million, whatever -- solemn warnings about tight security, long lines, traffic jams, cellphones not working. In the end, one wanted to be there on the Mall before the Capitol on Tuesday at noon amid the jubilant throng and see the man take the oath of office -- our first genuine Author-President.

So I hitchhiked a ride in the middle of the night on a jet heading to Baltimore and got to the train station at 5 a.m. and already the platform was packed. A lot of black people in parkas and scarves and mittens. It was like "The Apollo Goes to the Arctic." There were Obama stocking caps, ski caps, skullcaps and pins with the first family on them, and everyone was beaming, and nobody complained about how cold it was or having to wait in line.

People were being marshaled into waiting areas for each train to D.C., each of us with a Commemorative Train Ticket with a picture of Himself on it -- and the marshals, who wore yellow vests, were insistent on us Staying In Our Place, but I just boarded the first train that came through and nobody ever checked my ticket. Big rules, no enforcement.

I rode with a group of black women who had left Portsmouth, Va., at 1 a.m. to be sure to be there on time. They were heavily bundled and so excited they could hardly speak. And then when the conductor called out "Union Station, Washington," one of them looked at the others and she burst into tears. And they all cried. I would have, too, if they'd looked at me.

Long lines at Union Station for coffee and restrooms, but everyone was in such a fine mood that waiting was painless, and the same was true of the line to go through security and be scanned and get onto the Capitol grounds. The line was six blocks long, the longest line I have ever stood in, but there is nothing so pleasant as being in a crowd of happy people when you are happy about the same thing they're happy about. Up above, cops with automatic rifles on parapets and walkways, and down below the mob milled along Louisiana Avenue and the line inched forward and the good will radiated up from the crowd just like in Grant Park on Election Night.

It was more than Democrats feeling their oats or African-Americans celebrating the unimaginable, more than revulsion at the gang of bullheads who held power for too long. It was a huge gasp of pleasure at a new America emerging, a country we all tried to believe in, a nation that is curious and venturesome, more openhearted and public-spirited.

All kinds of people, the slim and sleek, the XXXLs, the heavily insulated, the carefree, and we moved through ranks of souvenir sellers -- whatever else he may accomplish, Obama has been a boon to the pin and T-shirt trade -- and in our slow trek toward the Capitol, one felt the enormity of the day for the black people around us. I wouldn't try to express, I simply was grateful to be among it. Old ladies with sore feet hauled themselves along.

The crowd down below the podium had their opinions. There was a profound silence when Mrs. Bush was announced and walked out. People watched the big screen and when Mrs. Obama appeared, there was a roar, and when the Current Occupant and Mr. Cheney came out of the Capitol, a low and heartfelt rumble of booing. Dignified booing. Old black ladies around me tried to shush them -- "Don't do that!" they hissed -- but it's a democracy, and how will those men know how we feel if we don't tell them?

The band tootled on and there were shouts of "O-ba-ma" and also "Yes we can" (and also "Down in front") and then he came out and the place went up. That was the first big moment. The second was when he took the oath and said, "So help me, God" and the cannons boomed and you got a big lump in your throat. And the third was afterward.

The invocation was extensive and segued into the Lord's Prayer, and the music was OK if you like Aaron Copland, and the inaugural speech was good enough, calling on us all to great deeds and sacrifice, details to be announced later. You could hear each oratorical phrase repeated over and over in the series of loudspeakers down the Mall and bouncing off stone facades, a sort of cubist effect. The inaugural poet followed, a sort of filler, with a long windup, a few good phrases in the middle ("someone is trying to make music somewhere ... a teacher says, 'Take out your pencils. Begin'"), and then it trailed off into some misty thoughts about love. And then a big horn blast of a benediction.

But the great moment came later, as the mob flowed slowly across the grounds. I heard loud cheers behind me and there on the giant screen was the Former Occupant and Mrs. Bush saying goodbye to the Obamas in the parking lot behind the Capitol, the Marine helicopter behind them.

The crowd stopped and stared, a little stunned at the reality of it.

They saw it on a screen in front of the Capitol and it was actually happening on the other side. The Bushes went up the stairs, turned, waved and disappeared into the cabin, and people started to cheer in earnest. When the blades started turning, the cheering got louder, and when the chopper lifted up above the Capitol and we saw it in the sky heading for the airport, a million jubilant people waved and hollered for all they were worth. It was the most genuine, spontaneous, universal moment of the day. It was like watching the ice go out on the river.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty," published by Viking.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Founders’ Great Mistake

Who is responsible for the past eight years of dismal American governance? “George W. Bush” is a decent answer. But we should reserve some blame for the Founding Fathers, who created a presidential office that is ill-considered, vaguely defined, and ripe for abuse. Here’s how to fix what the Founders got wrong—before the next G. W. Bush enters the Oval Office.

Garrett Epps

Atlantic

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 ATLANTIC

FOR THE PAST eight years, George W. Bush has treated the White House much as Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad treated a new automobile—like a shiny toy to be wrecked by racing the motor, spinning smoke from the tires, and smashing through farmyards until the wheels come off. Bush got to the Oval Office despite having lost the popular vote, and he governed with a fine disdain for democratic and legal norms—stonewalling congressional oversight; detaining foreigners and U.S. citizens on his “inherent authority”; using the Justice Department as a political cudgel; ordering officials to ignore statutes and treaties that he found inconvenient; and persisting in actions, such as the Iraq War, that had come to be deeply unpopular in Congress and on Main Street.

Understandably, most Americans today are primarily concerned with whether Barack Obama can clean up Bush’s mess. But as Bush leaves the White House, it’s worth asking why he was able to behave so badly for so long without being stopped by the Constitution’s famous “checks and balances.” Some of the problems with the Bush administration, in fact, have their source not in Bush’s leadership style but in the constitutional design of the presidency. Unless these problems are fixed, it will only be a matter of time before another hot-rodder gets hold of the keys and damages the country further.

The historian Jack N. Rakove has written, “The creation of the presidency was [the Framers’] most creative act.” That may be true, but it wasn’t their best work. The Framers were designing something the modern world had never seen—a republican chief executive who would owe his power to the people rather than to heredity or brute force. The wonder is not that they got so much wrong, but that they got anything right at all.

According to James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, the executive received surprisingly little attention at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Debate over the creation and workings of the new Congress was long and lively; the presidency, by contrast, was fashioned relatively quickly, after considerably less discussion. One important reason for the delegates’ reticence was that George Washington, the most admired man in the world at that time, was the convention’s president. Every delegate knew that Washington would, if he chose, be the first president of the new federal government—and that the new government itself would likely fail without Washington at the helm. To express too much fear of executive authority might have seemed disrespectful to the man for whom the office was being tailored.

Washington’s force of personality terrified almost all of his contemporaries, and although he said little as presiding officer, he was not always quiet. Once, when an unknown delegate left a copy of some proposed provisions lying around, Washington scolded the delegates like a headmaster reproving careless prep-schoolers, and then left the document on a table, saying, “Let him who owns it take it.” No one did.

Even when Washington remained silent, his presence shaped the debate. When, on June 1, James Wilson suggested that the executive power be lodged in a single person, no one spoke up in response. The silence went on until Benjamin Franklin finally suggested a debate; the debate itself proceeded awkwardly for a little while, and was then put off for another day.

Many of the conversations about presidential authority were similarly awkward, and tended to be indirect. Later interpreters have found the original debates on the presidency, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, “almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.”

In the end, the Framers were artfully vague about the extent and limits of the president’s powers. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which empowers Congress, runs 429 words; Article II, Section 2, the presidential equivalent, is about half as long. The powers assigned to the president alone are few: he can require Cabinet members to give him their opinions in writing; he can convene a special session of Congress “on extraordinary occasions,” and may set a date for adjournment if the two houses cannot agree on one; he receives ambassadors and is commander in chief of the armed forces; he has a veto on legislation (which Congress can override); and he has the power to pardon.

The president also shares two powers with the Senate—to make treaties, and to appoint federal judges and other “officers of the United States,” including Cabinet members. And, finally, the president has two specific duties—to give regular reports on the state of the union, and to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

All in all, the text of Article II, while somewhat ambiguous—a flaw that would be quickly exploited—provided little warning that the office of president would become uniquely powerful. Even at the convention, Madison mused that it “would rarely if ever happen that the executive constituted as ours is proposed to be would have firmness enough to resist the legislature.” In fact, when citizens considered the draft Constitution during the ratification debates in 1787 and 1788, many of their concerns centered on the possibility that the Senate would make the president its cat’s-paw. Few people foresaw the modern presidency, largely because the office as we know it today bears so little relation to that prescribed by the Constitution.

The modern presidency is primarily the intellectual handiwork not of “the Framers” but of one Framer—Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s idea of the presidency can be found in a remarkable speech he gave to the convention, on June 18, 1787. In it, Hamilton argued that the president should serve for life, name Cabinet members without Senate approval, have an absolute veto on legislation, and have “the direction of war” once “authorized or begun.” The president would be a monarch, Hamilton admitted, but an “elective monarch.”

Hamilton’s plan was so far from the mainstream of thought at the convention that none of its provisions was ever seriously discussed. Nonetheless, Hamilton was and remains the chief theorist of the presidency, first in writing his essays for The Federalist and then in serving as George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury. In this latter role, acting as Washington’s de facto prime minister, Hamilton took full advantage of the vagueness and brevity of Article II, laying the groundwork for an outsize presidency while the war-hero Washington was still in office.

In The Federalist, Hamilton had famously proclaimed that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Just how much energy he favored became clear during America’s first foreign crisis, the Neutrality Proclamation controversy of 1793. When Britain and France went to war, many Americans wanted to aid their Revolutionary ally. But Washington and the Federalists were rightly terrified of war with the powerful British Empire. Washington unilaterally proclaimed that the United States would be neutral.

France’s American supporters, covertly aided by Thomas Jefferson, fiercely attacked Washington for exceeding his constitutional authority. The power to make treaties, they said, was jointly lodged in the president and the Senate; how could Washington unilaterally interpret or change the terms of the treaty of alliance with France?

Under the pen name “Pacificus,” Hamilton wrote a defense of Washington’s power to act without congressional sanction. The first Pacificus essay is the mother document of the “unitary executive” theory that Bush’s apologists have pushed to its limits since 2001. Hamilton seized on the first words of Article II: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” He contrasted this wording with Article I, which governs Congress and which begins, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” What this meant, Hamilton argued, was that Article II was “a general grant of … power” to the president. Although Congress was limited to its enumerated powers, the executive could do literally anything that the Constitution did not expressly forbid. Hamilton’s president existed, in effect, outside the Constitution.

That’s the Bush conception, too. In 2005, John Yoo, the author of most of the administration’s controversial “torture memos,” drew on Hamilton’s essay when he wrote, “The Constitution provides a general grant of executive power to the president.” Since Article I vests in Congress “only those legislative powers ‘herein granted,’” Yoo argued, the more broadly stated Article II must grant the president “an unenumerated executive authority.”

Hamilton’s interpretation has proved durable even though there is little in the record of constitutional framing and ratification to suggest that anyone else shared his view. In times of crisis, power flows to the executive; too rarely does it flow back. And while Washington himself used his power wisely (Jeffersonians found out in 1812 that pulling the British lion’s tail was poor policy), it was during his administration that the seeds of the “national-security state” were planted.  ... (more)

Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

This land is our land

Joan Walsh

salon.com

January 20, 2009

I was supposed to be Tweeting from the Lincoln Memorial concert today, but it turns out Tweetin' ain't easy, in a crowd estimated at 400,000. I couldn't get on the Internet most of the time, could rarely text, email or get a cell signal. It seemed strange to be so technologically thwarted on a day celebrating the victory of the world's most wired politician and campaign. But that meant ultimately I could stop trying to communicate and just enjoy it, and I did (once I tuned out the sight of sharpshooters lining the top of the Lincoln Memorial.)

If you're looking for snark, go elsewhere. (OK, the bald eagle thing was kind of hokey.) I am officially over my Rick Warren tantrum (at least until I see him Tuesday); between Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson's moving blessing to open the concert, to the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus singing "My Country Tis of Thee" where Marian Anderson sang it almost 70 years ago (after the Daughters of the American Revolution kept her out of Constitution Hall because she was black), followed shortly thereafter by the Navy Men's Glee Club. Rick Warren, you can't take that away from me. When the openly gay Robinson called on God to "bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people," I knew we're not in Dick Cheney's America any more.

If you'd told me that Garth Brooks would sing more songs than any other entertainer, including Beyonce, Bono and Bruce Springsteen, I'd have been prepared to be disappointed. But for me one high point was Brooks doing the Isley Brothers' "Shout" – it helps if you saw the movie "Wedding Crashers'" great montage showing lame cover bands doing "Shout" at weddings of every race and culture, Jewish, Indian, Irish, African American. Yes, I'll admit that made me think of Obama presiding over a sappy interracial wedding, and watching that sea of arms flying up every time Brooks said "throw your hands up" was one of my favorite moments of the day.

The genius of the whole event was the culture mashup – readings presented by duos like Steve Carell and Jamie Foxx, Jack Black and Rosario Dawson, Laura Linney and Martin Luther King III, Forest Whitaker and Ashley Judd – yes, Jack Black. Likewise, Jon Bon Jovi and Bettye LaVette's duet on Sam Cooke's Obama anthem "A Change is Gonna Come" was extraordinarily moving. My personal high point – I'd have braved the cold and crowds for this moment alone – was Pete Seeger and his son, joined by Springsteen, singing all the lyrics to "This Land is Your Land" – and watching Obama sing along. The only remotely controversial note (beyond Robinson's prayer for anger at discrimination) was when Bono called the values embodied in Obama's election "an American dream, an Irish dream… a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream,” and then added: “And also a Palestinian dream.”

Obama himself called the celebration an expression of "just what it is that we love about America." And where I was disappointed that Obama only slightly nodded to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Denver acceptance speech (on the 45th anniversary of King's "I have a dream" speech), today his praise and attention to the parallels of their cause was full-throated and moving. Obama's voice deepened and grew louder as he talked about King's dream "that his children might be judged on the content of their character." He also praised "the man who made this day possible," Abraham Lincoln, and said American progress will come "if we could just recognize ourselves in one another."

And yes, then there was Garth Brooks. The entire crowd – young, old, black, white, Latino, Asian, everyone – seemed to sing along to "American Pie," including Obama, which could mark him, generationally and culturally, more than anything else that happened today. Who knew they knew all the words? I didn't until today (actually, Brooks wisely shortened it.) And I couldn't help but see Brooks, singing along with a multiracial youth choir, as another part of Obama's outreach to red America, a real reminder that he doesn't plan to be president of Blue America, or Red America, but the United States of America. I hope Republicans get the message.

I think this will go down as one of the best days of my life for a long time, except for the fact that I had to make a kind of comic "Sophie's Choice:" I had a press credential and my college-student daughter didn't, so she headed for steerage when I got to the press tent. I told her I'd probably just come out and join her in the crowd, how could I see it without her – until I saw that the press area had uniquely awesome views (they don't always) and I couldn't imagine leaving. We texted throughout, and she shared her great stories of the real event – topped by people climbing on Porta-Potties to get a better view, then being ordered down by police, then being unable to get down, then being rescued by men in camoflauge. I missed her when Pete Seeger sang "This Land is Your Land," because I used to sing it to her 19 years ago, when she was a baby.

It was the kind of event that made you want to share TMI personal details like that – and also the kind of event where you didn't need to know a soul to suddenly be surrounded by friends and family. Nora and I met up afterwards for the long trek home, and we felt lucky to have two sets of views of this historic day. For the first time in my adult life, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, I am crazy in love with my country, and it was fun to attend this schmaltzy sort of wedding to celebrate the change that's gonna come. I reserve the right to update this post later, when I slap my forehead and say, "How could I not have written about that?" Or maybe I'll just Tweet it.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc. 

The Long, Lame Goodbye

Maureen Dowd

Ed-Op Columnist

The New York Times 

January 18, 2009

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.

As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”

Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)

W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.

W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good. 

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

So Long Worst President Ever; 10 Reasons History Will Hang You

Bernie Horn

Campaign for America's Future 

January 16, 2009

There are probably a hundred examples where Bush conservatism failed; here are the top 10.

George W. Bush presented his valedictory last night, desperately seeking thanks and congratulations. So here goes: Thanks and congratulations, W, for showing the world that today's conservatism is an abject failure.

Thanks to Bush, we know that conservatives are not fiscally responsible, they are not for small government, they don't stand up for moral values and they won't make Americans one bit safer. Conservatives aren't even true defenders of "free markets" -- having presided over the biggest market bailout in the world.

After eight long years, Bush can no longer fool the public. Polls show that he is the most unpopular president in the history of survey research. When the 2006 and 2008 elections are considered together, Bush policies resulted in the landslide rejection of his party at both the federal and state levels. There are probably a hundred examples where Bush conservatism failed, but let's stick with the top 10.

1. The worst recession since the 1930s. The current recession will be the deepest and longest downturn since the Great Depression. And unlike other recessions, this one was directly caused by conservative anti-regulatory policy. In fact, recent evaluations show that Bush policies never created any real growth -- the ephemeral financial upswings of the past eight years were based on market bubbles and economic Band-Aids.

2. The worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The Bush administration, flacking an "ownership society," helped manufacture the housing bubble. When it burst, Americans lost $6 trillion in housing wealth (so far), fueling a market crash that has cost Americans $8 trillion of stock wealth, according to economist Dean Baker. On a grand scale, we've been mugged.

3. The worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. That's what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., correctly called the Iraq war. This pre-emptive war -- based on phony pretenses -- is now the second longest in our nation's history (after Vietnam). Some 35,000 Americans are dead or wounded, as well as an enormous number of innocent Iraqis. And even today, more than five years later, can anyone explain why Bush marched us into this quagmire?

4. Unprecedented rejection of human rights. Recently, a Bush administration official finally admitted that the U.S. government engaged in torture at Guantanamo Bay detention center. Bush admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding. While these clear violations of the Geneva Conventions would have been unthinkable a few years ago, today we're not surprised. From Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, to years-long detention of innocents and the unrestrained killing of civilians by U.S.-paid mercenaries, this administration has systematically squandered our nation's moral standing in the world, making us less able to protect Americans and American interests worldwide.

5. Watergate-style abuses of power. As the House Judiciary Committee staff has documented, Bush used the politics of fear and division to justify warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans  (including U.S.soldiers fighting overseas), spying on peaceful domestic groups and the use of national security letters to pry into the private records of millions of Americans. He also presided over illegal politicization of the Justice Department and retribution against critics. In fact, Bush claimed the authority to disobey hundreds of laws -- as if Richard Nixon were right when he famously said: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

6. Unprecedented increases in inequality. The Economic Policy Institute reports, "For the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data back in the mid-1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of this business cycle than they were when it started." That's because Bush policy was designed to increase economic inequality. The richest 1 percent of the population received 36 percent of the Bush tax cuts; the least-affluent 40 percent received only 9 percent. While the rich got exponentially richer, the poverty rate and the percentage of uninsured dramatically increased.

7. A culture of sleaze. This was an administration without shame. Kicked off by Vice President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, the administration fostered a "greed is good" culture. The subsequent conservative money scandals (Jack Abramoff; White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian;  Republicans Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Duke Cunningham of California and Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska) and other lawlessness (Cheney's Chief of Staff O. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho) have toppled the conservative "moral values" façade into the gutter, where it belongs.

8. Blind rejection of science. The Bush administration thumbed its nose at scientific evidence that contradicted conservative political goals. The resulting lies about global warming, endangered species, toxic chemicals and consumer products threaten the health and safety of every American. And the virtual outlawing of stem cell research has delayed important medical advances by years, causing immeasurable suffering and loss of life.

9. Utter refusal to protect the health, safety and legal rights of Americans. Following the conservative business-is-always-right philosophy, Bush dismantled the agencies and rules designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous businesses, workers from reckless employers and small companies from anti-competitive large companies. If conservatives didn't like a federal law, they blocked, hindered or defunded agency enforcement.

10. Presiding over our nation's worst natural disaster, and not caring. Hurricane Katrina was transformed from a calamity into a national disgrace by the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration. Before the hurricane struck, Bush had downsized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and placed in charge a political crony with no relevant experience. When Katrina ripped through Mississippi and Louisiana and inflicted nearly $100 billion in damages in New Orleans to become the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, FEMA was unprepared to help, and thousands of Americans suffered the consequences. More than three years later, New Orleans still has not recovered.

So, congratulations for being the worst president in American history. That's not just my personal opinion; that's the opinion of 109 historians polled by the History News Network. Fully 61 percent ranked Bush as the "worst ever;" 98 percent labeled his presidency a "failure." And this poll, taken in early 2008, predated the cataclysmic housing and banking crashes. Bye-bye W -- history will not be kind.

 

Statement of Campaign for America's Future Robert Borosage on the Bush Legacy

Statement of Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for American’s Future

George W. Bush is likely to be remembered only for his failures – for demonstrating, in no uncertain terms, the failure of modern conservatism. Handed all the reins of power – the White House, Congress, and to a large extent, the Supreme Court – conservative rule proved catastrophic.

George W. Bush embraced the bellicose unilateralism of the neo-conservatives, and undermined U.S. security in the worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam – the war of choice in Iraq. Bush and Cheney scorned the Constitution to tout the “unitary executive,” and shredded the moral reputation of the US across the world in the torture committed at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prisons.

 

Bush touted the supply doctrine of tax cuts uber alles, and created only greater debt, Gilded Age inequality and slow growth with stagnant wages. He championed the corporate “free trade” doctrines, and left the U.S. the world’s largest debtor, while American manufacturers suffered a decade-long recession. He celebrated deregulation and privatization, and watched as an unregulated banking system blew up the global economy with its speculative follies.

 

And now, at the end of this era of misrule, the costs are clear.

1.      An economy in tatters, in the midst of the worst recession and the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

2.      $3 trillion squandered on the war in Iraq, which is now the second longest in American history (behind Vietnam), leaving more than 4,200 Americans dead, 30,000 wounded, and a military stretched to its limit.

3.      Abuses of power that make Watergate look like a high school prank, including warrantless wiretapping, the politicization of the Justice Department, retribution against critics, and secret assertions of executive authority.

4.      Unprecedented scorn for international law and human rights – every day we learn more about the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the extraordinary rendition of individuals to countries that torture.

5.      Rejection of science in the name of politics, misleading the public about global warming, endangered species, toxic chemicals, and consumer safety.

6.      Refusal to protect Americans’ health, welfare, safety and legal rights by defunding or underfunding agencies charged with enforcing rules vital to keeping corporations accountable

7.      A criminally slow response to Hurricane Katrina, our nation’s worst natural catastrophe in generations.

8.      Gilded Age inequality, a declining middle class, and rising poverty – even when the economy was growing.

President Bush argues it is premature to judge his presidency. But history provides context, not whitewash. Inescapably, the presidency of George W. Bush – and the conservative policies that he pursued – will be ranked among the most calamitous in American history.

The Campaign for America's Future (CAF) is a center of progressive strategy, organizing and issue campaigns. CAF anchors a progressive leadership network, enlisting leaders at the national, state and local levels to build a more just and democratic society. The Campaign is leading the fight about America's priorities - against privatization of Social Security, for investment in energy independence, good jobs and a sustainable economy, for affordable health care and more.

  

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