AFTER THAT MUCH CHANGE, HITTING THE PAUSE BUTTON TO CONSOLIDATE IS UNDERSTANDABLE (via Ten Second News):

Why Obama Should Copy Bush (Really!) (Jonathan Cohn, November 09, 2008, TNR: The Plank)

But was Bush really a “failure”? That depends on how you define it.

Consider what Bush has accomplished. He has overhauled the tax code, tilting it towards the wealthy and significantly reducing federal revenues. He signed a landmark education reform that changed the curriculum in virtually ever public school. He gutted the regulatory state and hollowed out the bureaucracy. He added a drug benefit to Medicare, thereby enacting the largest single entitlement expansion since the 1960s. He tipped the Supreme Court’s ideological balance with two strongly conservative appointees.

And that’s just what he did on domestic policy. Bush also sponsored a massive program to help treat AIDS in under-developed countries. He rewrote long-standing doctrine on foreign policy and human rights. And, oh yeah, he engineered--and then prosecuted--a war that overthrew a dictator, destabilized a region, and committed the U.S. to an occupation whose end is still unknown.

That’s quite a tally--arguably, one that no president since Lyndon Johnson can match. (Before that, you'd have to go back to FDR.) And with the exception of the Medicare drug program, every single one of those accomplishments represent a realization of goals that he, his fellow travelers in the conservative movement, or both had sought for years or even decades.

America today looks radically different than it did in January, 2001. And it looks that way because Bush made it so.

Mr. Cohn gets some of it, but hardly all. Note, for example, that the prescription drug program brought with it the HSAs that the GOP had failed to pass for a decade. And, to take just one other obvious one he missed, W made India a more significant ally than any continental European country.

Not only has Barack Obama modeled himself on W but so have the new leaders--or imminent new leaders--of Canada, Australia, England, Germany, France, the Vatican, etc..

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2008 8:46 AM