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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
If Bush insists on reassessment, OK….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If President Bush himself wasn’t driving it with repeated appearances, culminating in Thursday night’s speech to the nation, the current obsession with assessing his legacy would begin to feel like piling on. There’s just not much good to say about the last eight years.
The Washington Post, for example, has a good wrapup on the economic performance since 2001. It’s true that a president gets too much of the blame for a bad economy, and too much of the credit for a good one, but for a long time Bush and his supporters tried to cite the economy as an accomplishment. Says the Post:
“President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges.
The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father.
Bush and his aides are quick to point out that they oversaw 52 straight months of job growth in the middle of this decade, and that the economy expanded at a steady clip from 2003 to 2007. But economists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation’s economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an “ownership society,” have proved unsustainable.
“The expansion was a continuation of the way the U.S. has grown for too long, which was a consumer-led expansion that was heavily concentrated in housing,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a onetime Bush White House staffer and one of Sen. John McCain’s top economic advisers for his presidential campaign. “There was very little of the kind of saving and export-led growth that would be more sustainable.”
“For a group that claims it wants to be judged by history, there is no evidence on the economic policy front that that was the view,” Holtz-Eakin said. “It was all Band-Aids.”…
“It’s sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, and an informal adviser to McCain’s campaign. “It’s almost a lost economic decade.”…
Even excluding the 2008 recession, however, Bush presided over a weak period for the U.S. economy. For example, for the first seven years of the Bush administration, gross domestic product grew at a paltry 2.1 percent annual rate.
Some of the president’s defenders claim that people never gave him a chance, that the way in which he took office after the Supreme Court ruling of 2000 soured much of the country on him from the beginning. The facts don’t begin to justify that claim.
In the summer of ‘01, just a few months after taking office and before Sept. 11, Bush was enjoying favorability ratings of around 60 percent, with 30 percent disapproval ratings. And of course, after the terror attacks those numbers soared as Americans rallied around their leader. In the Fox poll, he peaked in December 01 with a favorability rating of 84 percent and unfavorables at 12 percent.
The unfavorables didn’t exceed the favorables until after Hurricane Katrina in ‘05, and they have stayed that way ever since. In other words, Bush isn’t a victim here. He got his historically low rating the old-fashioned way: He EARNED it.
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