November 14, 2010
THE PROBLEM BEING...:
Obama=Bush?: President Obama isn’t the new Carter, but he just might be the new (first) Bush (James Verini, November 14, 2010, Boston Globe)
[W]here Carter, a notorious micromanager and hand-wringer, appeared to bog down in the carpet fibers of the presidency, a common complaint about Obama is that he’s in the clouds. Where Carter was said to have a morose and pedantic outlook, Obama is accused of being, rather, cerebral and aloof — related charges, maybe, but not the same. Recounting Carter’s fumbling Mideast statecraft in his book “A World of Trouble,” Patrick Tyler described an “obsessive technocrat who wore his idealism like a crucifix and his pragmatism like a slide rule clipped to his waistband.” That’s not Obama.Yet there is a recent one-term president he resembles. George H.W. Bush doesn’t often come up in discussions of Obama, but two years into Obama’s term, the two presidents’ tenures bear a striking resemblance. So too do their governing styles and temperaments, and even, unlikely though it may seem, their speech. Here are two leaders “buffeted by circumstance,” as the presidential historian Bert Rockman characterized Bush, whose same signal qualities in repulsing buffets and discussing them with the public — sobriety, patience, and, yes, prudence, to use Bush-impersonator Dana Carvey’s favorite Bushism — are often enough their least appreciated.
...that GHWB has three significant accomplishments to balance out his several mistakes: (1) he oversaw the successful and rather smooth dismantling of the Soviet Bloc; (2) he began the drawdown from the Cold War/Iraq War, even at the political cost of a Democrat-favored tax-hiking budget deal to reorder the fiscal house; and (3) he led the hugely successful S&L rescue.
That record puts tremendous pressure on the UR to get the following done in his remaining two years: (1) establish independent nations in South Lebanon, Western Pakistan and Palestine; (2) pass some serious budget measures, even at the political cost of Republican-favored spending cuts; and, (3) since the TARP was handed on to him by W, find some way to goose the housing market that can distinctly be credited to him.
