- 19 Jan 2009 03:51
#1764802
Based on a post I made elsewhere I'm suggesting Bush really made only two really bad decisions: Iraq and the deficit (which is a bunch of smaller decisions)
The Bush presidency could be best described as a bunch of time bombs that he didn't plant going off at once. Sure, he could have caught and diffused them, but given that no one else thought to before it's not really just on him. 9/11 (and by extension Afghanistan) was a result of lax anti-terror policies for years before. The Katrina bungling was because of poor federal and state response procedures that Bush either inherited or had nothing to do with, and they just happened to be tested during his presidency.
Most recently, the economic crisis was/is a result of government inflation of the housing bubble (especially among the poor), a practice that the US had been involved in for years but really got into full swing with the low interest rates early in the decade. Bush agreed that everyone should be able to own a house, which shows some serious ignorance of economics, but he was just continuing policy from before and was unlucky enough to be in office when it blew up. Had he seen it coming he could have eased off "everyone owns a house, gogogo Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" or regulated the financial industry to hell and back, but no one except for a handful of economists and professional investors saw it coming so it's unreasonable to think that the federal government, the poster child for incompetency, could.
Don't get me wrong, the deficit alone still puts him in bad, bad territory, but the rest of the stuff he gets too much blame for. Had His Highness Obama been in office these last 8 years I could see:
- Worse economic crisis. He undoubtedly would have made putting the poor in houses a higher priority than conservative (even if only barely) Bush. The bubble would have been propped up longer, probably.
- Far better Katrina result. The same thing that would have made the economic crisis worse would have made Katrina better: Obama would have shown deep concern for the poor citizens of New Orleans and deployed a great deal of federal aid. At the very least he'd come out of it looking like he did all he could, rather than Bush saying "good job Brownie" to a national audience. And Kanye West certainly wouldn't have suggested he doesn't care about black people.
- 9/11 would probably be the same. Obama certainly wouldn't have encouraged tightened security within our borders without pushing if Bush didn't.
It's not like the guy caused 9/11, or Katrina, or the housing/credit crisis.
The Bush presidency could be best described as a bunch of time bombs that he didn't plant going off at once. Sure, he could have caught and diffused them, but given that no one else thought to before it's not really just on him. 9/11 (and by extension Afghanistan) was a result of lax anti-terror policies for years before. The Katrina bungling was because of poor federal and state response procedures that Bush either inherited or had nothing to do with, and they just happened to be tested during his presidency.
Most recently, the economic crisis was/is a result of government inflation of the housing bubble (especially among the poor), a practice that the US had been involved in for years but really got into full swing with the low interest rates early in the decade. Bush agreed that everyone should be able to own a house, which shows some serious ignorance of economics, but he was just continuing policy from before and was unlucky enough to be in office when it blew up. Had he seen it coming he could have eased off "everyone owns a house, gogogo Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" or regulated the financial industry to hell and back, but no one except for a handful of economists and professional investors saw it coming so it's unreasonable to think that the federal government, the poster child for incompetency, could.
Don't get me wrong, the deficit alone still puts him in bad, bad territory, but the rest of the stuff he gets too much blame for. Had His Highness Obama been in office these last 8 years I could see:
- Worse economic crisis. He undoubtedly would have made putting the poor in houses a higher priority than conservative (even if only barely) Bush. The bubble would have been propped up longer, probably.
- Far better Katrina result. The same thing that would have made the economic crisis worse would have made Katrina better: Obama would have shown deep concern for the poor citizens of New Orleans and deployed a great deal of federal aid. At the very least he'd come out of it looking like he did all he could, rather than Bush saying "good job Brownie" to a national audience. And Kanye West certainly wouldn't have suggested he doesn't care about black people.
- 9/11 would probably be the same. Obama certainly wouldn't have encouraged tightened security within our borders without pushing if Bush didn't.
It's not like the guy caused 9/11, or Katrina, or the housing/credit crisis.