Richard Wolffe, the liberal writer, has a bad sense of timing: His book, “Revival,” about President Obama’s “renaissance” in the spring of this year, came out just after the Democrats’ sweeping rebuke in the 2010 midterms, forcing his reviewer — a Bill Clinton speech writer who wrote a good book about the LBJ-RFK fracas — to note that the political fortunes of the Republican Party were the main things Obama revived.
This is not true of President George W. Bush, whose own book appeared just as the boom came down on his successor and nemesis, putting his years in a balanced perspective and shining new light on his own stormy reign. Among these lights are that Obama gets his best marks for continuing things started by Bush, such as the surge strategy, and the protocols for fighting the war on terror; and that Bush appears as a model of competence, compared both to Obama and myth.
Bush could be incompetent, but only sporadically: He was extremely competent from 2001 through mid-2003; incompetent from then until after the 2006 midterms; and from then to the end of his term — the financial meltdown not really withstanding — competent and effective again.
Bush reacted to the greatest national shock since Pearl Harbor with an explosion of competence that took critics and friends by surprise. His protocols stand up as models of competence, not only in preventing further attacks on this country, but in being embraced by the administration that campaigned against them.
The first stage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were competence multiplied. Incompetence set in during the aftermath, as the light footprint was too light to enforce civic order, and years passed in the effort to build Western models of “civil society,” whereas the indigenous tribes were the real thing all along.
On the domestic side also, he seemed to lose focus: Those years brought Harriet Miers, Hurricane Katrina, and the February 2006 attack on the Shiite shrine in Samarra, which tipped Iraq from disorder into full civil war. October 2006 was the worst month of the war in Iraq, and November was the worst month for Republicans, who lost the Senate, the House and the Bush coalition.
Like President Clinton before him (and Obama after), Bush had squandered his only two years of total authority. But if nothing recedes like success, nothing instructs like adversity, as Clinton and Bush would soon prove.
Wolffe thinks Obama showed “resilience” in reacting to two political setbacks, his loss of his lead in 2008 after John McCain’s convention; and his passage of health care after Scott Brown’s election in March 2010. But in the first case, he was saved by the financial implosion, and the second led to his wipeout in the 2010 midterms, intensified by the fact that the health care law’s viability is by no means assured.
Bush, on the other hand, did save Iraq — dissing the force of conventional wisdom, finding his Ulysses S. Grant in Gen. David Petraeus, thwarting the efforts of Democrats in both houses of Congress to strangle the surge in its crib.
The financial crash at the end of his term was a bipartisan flier, for which several Democrats had been largely responsible. Conservatives claimed Bush had compromised his and their principles with his hurried TARP bailout. It is more likely he saved the country and world from a second Depression that would have sent conservatives into the wilderness for the next 20 years.
Bush is a hard man to rank, as he performed on such varying levels of competence, but better intermittent high levels than none whatsoever. Now, if Obama could only do something other than talk.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
