Bush's Anti-Legacy

By now you may have read the big article in the Washington Post, examining the state of a failed president who is too self-absorbed to feel as beleagured as he actually is. At this point, the article tells us, Bush is focused on Iraq to the exclusion of everything else, convinced that his legacy will ride upon that war alone.

Matt Yglesias reminds us that, arguably, his legacy lies equally in his extraordinary failure to have a legacy, particularly in domestic matters:

It's also true that for a two term president who enjoyed GOP congressional control for several years, he really does have remarkably few legislative accomplishments. Where other leaders would have seen an opportunity to push a governing agenda, Bush saw an opportunity to evade congressional oversight as he used the executive branch to commit crimes against the constitution, fill many executive agencies with incompetents, and fill others with people who helped his campaigns' financial backers rob the public. Which leads us to what's probably the most important aspect of Bush's non-Iraq legacy, his decision to provide an elegant demonstration of public choice theory and destroy public faith in the possibility of government action by showing exactly how poorly a government can be run.

Yglesias goes on to list some of the failures.

Compassionate conservatism, it seems to me, was the theory behind a potential agenda. But therein lies another legacy: our debate over why it failed as a governing philosophy. Because Bush wasn't sufficiently committed to the actual policies the campassiocon theorists prescribed? Because he was too incompetent to implement them properly, or to sell them to the public? Because ideas matter less to conservative elites than opportunities to enrich their friends and strip away irritating regulations? Or because they really weren't very good ideas to begin with?

Labels: compassionate conservatism, George Bush

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:28 PM