Bush’s speech yields reflection

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: January 29, 2008

President Bush's latest lament as he delivered his final State of the Union speech Monday was fitting. For much of his presidency, his staff complained that as the economy steadily chugged ahead, attention was mostly devoted to failings in Iraq. Now that the much-ballyhooed surge in troop forces appears to have improved security in Iraq, attention has shifted to an economy that is limping rather than surging.

The guy can't win.

Bush's hope is that history will treat him more kindly than has the present. That thinking undergirded the president's remarks last night. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino described the theme this way: "Trusting and empowering people to make decisions for themselves."

But the dichotomies that have defined Bush's presidency since he ambled into the Oval Office speak louder than his words. His domestic agenda has been driven by government intervention through the No Child Left Behind law to fix education and, more recently, government intervention through tax rebates and other tinkering to energize the sagging economy. Abroad, Bush's vision has been to forcibly install democracy in places where it has been little wanted.

Keeping us safe from al-Qaida attackers has translated to government incursions into the private lives of American citizens through wiretaps, breeding still more layers in an already thick bureaucracy and the seizure of lotions and lighters at airport checkpoints. If there were some realm where the president truly trusted us, or anyone outside of government, to make decisions for ourselves, we are hard-pressed to locate it.

If we accept the premise that Bush's actions here and beyond were necessary - to repair a fractured educational system, pump life into an economy battered by 9/11 and confront terror on foreign lands rather than on our soil - then we might be inclined to look elsewhere for signs of the fiscal conservative many people thought they elected. That search would be futile. Pork-barrel spending, and the deficit along with it, soared under his watch.

Democrats will point to other inconsistencies. Bush told us he would be a uniter not a divider, but his relationship with the opposition party was like his oratory, lost, fragmented and broken. He proclaimed himself a compassionate conservative, but failed to follow through on many of the initiatives he espoused. We are not sold on the necessity of presidents being uniters or compassionate conservatives, but Bush affixed those labels to himself and by most estimations rendered them hollow.

Not since Pearl Harbor has a U.S. president faced circumstances like those into which Bush was thrust. In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush seemed poised to be a leader of extraordinary qualities. His bullhorn proclamation from the New York City rubble that terrorists would hear us soon inspired people of every political stripe.

But what he might call his misunderestimation of what would be required to accomplish America's mission in Iraq, unwillingness to probe deeper into the flawed intelligence that led us there, betrayal of conservative principles and the massive expansion of government during his tenure adds up to failure. For the good of our country, we hope Bush is right about history vindicating him. From the vantage point of the present, Bush's presidency is a disappointment of dramatic proportions.

His is a legacy his successor will seek to overcome rather than build upon. It is one of promise unfulfilled. We hoped for better.