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JUDGING BUSH

Stanford University Press

Contents

Contributors...................................................................................................................................................xiPreface: A Call for Modesty ROBERT MARANTO....................................................................................................................xixAcknowledgments................................................................................................................................................xxiii1. Evaluating Presidents NEIL REEDY AND JEREMY JOHNSON........................................................................................................32. Bush's Brain (No, Not Karl Rove): How Bush's Psyche Shaped His Decision Making ROBERT MARANTO AND RICHARD E. REDDING.......................................213. The Cheneyization of the Bush Administration: Cheney Captures the Transition SHIRLEY ANNE WARSHAW..........................................................414. President Bush as Chief Executive JAMES P. PFIFFNER........................................................................................................585. Reactionary Ideologues and Uneasy Partisans: Bush and Realignment LARA M. BROWN............................................................................776. Diminishing Returns: George W. Bush and Congress, 2001-2008 ANDREW RUDALEVIGE..............................................................................967. Not Always According to Plan: Theory and Practice in the Bush White House KAREN M. HULT, CHARLES E. WALCOTT, AND DAVID B. COHEN............................1158. A Legal Revolution? The Bush Administration's Effect on the Judiciary and Civil Justice Reform LORI A. JOHNSON AND MICHAEL P. MORELAND.....................1369. George W. Bush's Education Legacy: The Two Faces of No Child Left Behind FREDERICK M. HESS AND PATRICK J. MCGUINN..........................................15710. The Politics of Economic Policy in a Polarized Era: The Case of George W. Bush JEFFREY E. COHEN AND COSTAS PANAGOPOULOS...................................17611. Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security ANNE M. KHADEMIAN..................................................................................19512. Is the Bush Doctrine Dead? ROBERT G . KAUFMAN.............................................................................................................21513. Forging an American Empire LAWRENCE J. KORB AND LAURA CONLEY..............................................................................................23414. Fighting Two Wars TOM LANSFORD AND JACK COVARRUBIAS.......................................................................................................25215. Between Journalism and History: Evaluating George W. Bush's Presidency WILLIAM A. GALSTON.................................................................273Afterword: Why Judging George W. Bush Is Never as Easy as It Seems JOHN J. DIIULIO JR.........................................................................294Index..........................................................................................................................................................311

Chapter One

EVALUATING PRESIDENTS is a notoriously hazardous and often sloppy enterprise. Establishing objective criteria to judge presidents removed from partisan preferences is an elusive goal for scholars, journalists, and the public. Yet such chief executives as Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington consistently rank at the top of surveys by scholars, with Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan at the bottom. Perhaps the most common characteristic of high-ranking presidents is the energy of the executive in times of crisis: they did not fear testing the boundaries of presidential powers. Conversely, less-regarded presidents failed to offer energetic leadership or bold policy proposals.

Perhaps taking this lesson to heart, George W. Bush, the nation's forty-third chief executive, determined to leave his mark on the nation and the presidency. Elected without a popular mandate in 2000, he still chose to govern assertively. Bush's presidency certainly did not lack crises to test his mettle. He faced in the early days the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and ended his administration trying to quell one of the gravest economic and financial crises since the great depression. In the middle of his presidency, he had to both manage the reconstruction efforts in Iraq and account for his administration's response to hurricane Katrina. It might be said that Bush was besieged with opportunities.

The presidency, in the words of Stephen Skowronek, works best as a "battering ram," demolishing old, enervated systems (1997, 27-28). It does not function as effectively in building new structures to replace the discarded models. A president needs to sense when the time is ripe for assertive leadership. Typically, greatness has been thrust on presidents because of the political times: a president cannot make himself "great" by virtue of willing it through activity. This is a dilemma that Bush, like all his presidential counterparts, has had to negotiate. How adroitly and competently did Bush and his entourage govern during his eight years in office? Did he take advantage of the opportunity for powerful leadership? Did he imagine opportunities that were not really there? Or did he have the opportunity but fail to respond effectively?

Bush aggressively pushed policy-from cutting taxes to education Reform-since the opening days of his administration. Moreover, after terrorism moved to the forefront of the political agenda, he promoted a robust, indeed explosive, foreign agenda. Bush self-consciously modeled himself as an active president who "hit the ground running" (Pfiffner 1996; Kettl 2003), yet currently both the contemporary scholarly community and the public judge Bush a failure (McElvaine 2008). A smaller cohort of scholars staunchly defends Bush.

Scholarly disagreement is matched by an unprecedented lack of public consensus. Diverging partisan assessments were apparent during Bush's contentious 2004 reelection campaign, when political scientist Gary Jacob son found that 90.5 percent of Republicans but only 15.2 percent of Democrats approved of Bush's handling of the job (Brownstein 2007, 16). Bush's popularity decreased further during his second term. Only a third of respondents approved of his performance in the three years after hurricane Katrina, with the decline coming mainly from political independents. Republicans still had a favorable view of the president, usually in the 70 percent range (Connelly 2007). This "hyperpartisanship" makes it all the more difficult to dispassionately rank George W. Bush, a theme developed by Jeffrey E. Cohen and Costas Panagopoulos in this volume.

In this chapter, we attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff by reviewing how the scholarly literature has grappled with the proper criteria for judging presidents. The question of how to rank and evaluate presidents is not new. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the presidential ranking genre in the November 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine. He assembled a team of fifty-five authorities on American history to categorize presidents into groupings of great, near great, average, below average, and...