Townhall…
Let
Bush be
by Victor Davis Hanson
Sep 13, 2012
The
theme of the president's 2012
re-election campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess
that
Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years.
In
other words, 43 months of
unemployment rates above 8 percent, $5 trillion in new borrowing, $16
trillion
in aggregate debt, gas prices of nearly $4 per gallon, a dive in
average family
income and involvement in two wars were all due to George Bush and
simply too
difficult for anyone else to overcome. So Obama cannot be judged on his
record
between 2009 and 2012.
At
first glance, this is a most
unusual claim. Gerald Ford followed the mess of Richard Nixon's
Watergate
scandal and the Arab oil embargo. After serving for less than three
years, he
failed to win re-election. His successor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to make
a bad
situation even worse. He exited four years later, tagged with a high
"misery index" fueled by rampant unemployment and roaring inflation.
Ronald
Reagan took office under
Carter's baleful legacy but ran for re-election successfully in 1984
based not
on "Carter did it," but on the recovery he engineered.
Bill
Clinton was elected on
"it's the economy, stupid" in 1992, and he was re-elected four years
later after claiming credit for boom times. George W. Bush inherited
the
aftershocks of the dot.com meltdown, and a country ill-equipped to
respond to
terrorist assaults after the nonchalance of the 1980s and 1990s.
Despite the
9/11 attacks, Bush was re-elected on the themes of a good economy and a
safer
country.
Blaming
or praising presidents for
their four years of governance is an American tradition. That is why
Obama
asserted at the outset that if he could not turn around the economy,
his
presidency would be a "one-term proposition…
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
|