Thursday, March 28, 2024
46.0°F

A closer look at Bush I and II

by Mike Ruskovich
| August 28, 2010 11:44 AM

One of life's most frustrating facts is that the here-and-now is a result of the there-and-then.

It's frustrating because we are forced to live with a past we can't change and to deal with a present in which change can be even more exasperating than existing frustrations. But whether it is the status quo or an attempt to change it, the here-and-now is a reality with which we must cope. Unfortunately, our frustrations too often prevent us from coping effectively.

Dealing effectively with the present requires vigilance if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Logically, this also involves attempting to improve the future. But too often we cope with our helpless inability to change the past by ignoring it, by conveniently altering our perceptions of it, or by blaming it, quite illogically, on the present. It's a recipe for becoming so mired in our mistakes that history is pushed beyond its proverbial repetition to find itself stuttering.

A great example of this would be our inaccurate perceptions of recent former presidents. We find it easier to blame the current leader than to face facts about our past leaders. Ronald Reagan was revered in his time and is almost deified in our time by worshippers who refuse to face history's fiduciary facts, but the balanced budget he repeatedly promised was never realized and our country was deep in debt by the end of his two terms. In light of his international successes, however, his fiscal failures are usually ignored and even resurrected disguised as successes. But time and truth have shown those willing to look history squarely in the eyes that many of Reagan's fiscal policies became bold steps toward our current recession.

Bill Clinton was rightfully reviled for presidential behaviors that dirtied the dignity Reagan brought to the office, but by the end of Clinton's two terms the country was in its best economic condition in decades, a fact constantly forwarded by those frustrated with the current economy. Hardcore Clinton admirers, however, seem unable to admit that some of the decisions that were financial successes in Clinton's time are current contributors to the recession of our time.

The best historical example of truth needing time to give us an accurate view of a recent president is George H. W. Bush. History initially gave the first president Bush a raw deal, but with the hindsight that time provides we are now able to see he was a far better president than those of his time judged him to be. Economically, the ill effects of failed Reagonomics plagued his presidency, but to his credit he did not publicly blame his predecessor. Internationally, the first Gulf War put an unfair stain on his tenure that would prove to have dire effects on the nation because it had a dire effect on his son.

Given the same amount of time history took to make us realize that the first president Bush was better than his peers believed him to be, the second president Bush will fall from the crumbling moral and religious pedestal upon which his supporters have placed him, and given the reverse Midas touch that haunted the man for eight years, it is doubtful his legacy will improve. Already, historians are faced with the ugly evidence of a presidency that will eventually be chronicled as a complete debacle.

Ironically, some professional observers blame the mess made by the second Bush on the wisdom of the first. Bush family chronicler Maureen Dowd, for example, makes a clear connection between the elder Bush's mature decision to limit Kuwait's liberation to its borders to the younger Bush's immature decision to invade Iraq.

Dowd claims that all the reasons the White House gave for dividing our forces and basically forgetting about Afghanistan had very little to do with military strategy and a great deal to do with familial dysfunction, positing the point that the younger Bush acted out of frustration over years of criticism aimed at his father by men he admired like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz and other hawks who believed Bush senior had been foolish not to continue into Iraq after liberating Kuwait. As evidence, Dowd uses some of the president's own public and private statements, going so far as to call the invasion an "Oedipal" act, an artificially rationalized attempt by a son to rectify his father's historical shame.

But our here-and-now is showing us that there should have been no shame back there-and-then. Turns out that the father's much-maligned "unfinished" mission in the Gulf provides us with a clear example of wise restraint, while the son's mission ... well, let's just say that the elder Bush did what he told the U.N. he was going to do and what they agreed to help him achieve, and that was to free Kuwait and not to charge beyond its borders in pursuit of Saddam Hussein.

That vainglorious mission was undertaken by the younger Bush, and history will show what a mistake it was. Even before the war had reached its apex our own investigators had reached the conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no twin towers terrorists being harbored there.

In spite of all the patriotic pageantry of there-and-then, we in the here-and-now are paying in a variety of expensive ways for the second Bush's international bumbling and his lack of oversight on the home front, a home front that was in far better economic shape when he inherited it than the one his father inherited, a home front mismanaged so completely that in his eight years he turned a healthy surplus into a deep deficit. And our current frustration over those damaging missteps of the past has pushed us into denial, divisive debates, and political posturing that exacerbates the problems and plagues yet another president.

One year in office is obviously not enough time to offset decades of previous decisions, no matter how much our frustration with our troubled here-and-now makes us want to believe it is. There will be plenty of blame to go around soon enough, but the heat our current president is taking radiates from coals created in fires that burned long before he entered politics. It remains to be seen if Obama will handle his leadership frustrations with the sagacity of the elder Bush or the impulsiveness of the younger. Either way, the here-and-now will soon be the there-and-then that will have either cured or caused further frustration in the fast-approaching future.

Mike Ruskovich is a resident of Blanchard.