What to do about Still-President Bush

Though the serious infighting, undermining, and 2012 posturing started a couple weeks ago, things have really picked up in the week since the big day. The fault lines between the plutocrats and the Christian Nationalists are growing clearer by the day; both rookie Repugnicans and veterans of conservatism’s 90’s successes are lining up supporters and GOP dinner dates while trying to figure out how to position themselves vis-à-vis the triple failure of Bush, McCain, and Palin.

Still-President Bush back in his prime

Newt Gingrich, possibly sensing a chance to forestall Mitt Romney’s ascension as the leader of the plutocrats, made news today by arguing for a wholesale renunciation of the Bush Administration. Had the Maverick been able to successfully disown the failures of Still-President Bush (instead of trying to out-Bush his primary opponents) the election may have turned out differently. Gingrich here is counting on the success of a retrograde rebranding by counting on the power of conservatives’ memories of the good times of the Contract with America era, before congressional Repugnicans were best known for their lobbying scandals, corruption charges, and lascivious AIM convos.

It might work, but The Newt is betting on the return of a dated political paradigm that relies on a discourse of crime reduction, welfare reform, immigration restrictions, and tax cuts. This strategy’s success depends on voters not only forgetting about the impending (rec/depr)ession, young voters going home, and a post-Obama American mileu disavowing the Repugnicans’ (barely concealed) racist discourse. Indeed, Newt’s return to power would ignore the pseudoprogressive inclusiveness advocated by Bobby Jindal and Charlie Crist (even 1999’s Governor Bush reached out to Latinos) and think nothing of this year’s embarassingly monochromatic convention.

One might think - judging by Repugnican candidates’ eagerness to appear with Still-President Bush in the last few months - that everyone in the GOP would want to turn the page on the last eight years. But the Wall Street Journal inexplicably ran an Op-Ed last Wednesday arguing that we’ve all been unfair to Bush because we couldn’t see what his vision revealed.

It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.

Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman’s low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

One would think that the plutocratic WSJ would try to dump the blame for the administration’s failures at the feet of the Christian Nationalists. Maybe they don’t realize (or don’t want to) that they could be forced to pick sides in this conflict soon enough. Or maybe they have chosen sides.