You say Obama, I say Bush

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - 8:45 PM

The Century Foundation's Jeffrey Laurenti earlier this week on the sharp differences between the Obama administration and its predecessor:

Barack Obama is reaping treble returns for America this week as he makes his first appearance as president at the United Nations. Never has an American president been greeted on the U.N.'s unique global stage with such giddy anticipation, or undertaken so extensive and substantive a schedule there....
[I]t is Obama's dramatic realignment of U.S. policy away from American conservatives' unique fetishes, and to the mainstream goals and values that most of the American people share with the rest of the world, that explains the new opportunity for renewed American leadership.

From Helene Cooper's write-up of Obama's United Nations speech today in the New York Times:

But even as Mr. Obama sought to signal a changed tone in America’s dealings with the world, much of his speech centered on old and intractable issues, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and a Middle East peace process. And while his choice of words was different and more conciliatory, the backbone of American policy he expressed remained similar to the Bush administration’s in many areas.

Well, that clarifies matters, then.

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EXPLORE:U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, BUSH, FOREIGN POLICY COMMUNITY, OBAMA

This breath of fresh air has a familiar whiff to it

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Thursday, January 15, 2009 - 4:20 AM

So I see that President-elect Barack Obama has been meeting and greeting pundits and columnists from across the political spectrum.

While what was said was off the record, Andrew Sullivan does blog his own impressions of his conversation with Obama:

[I]t's hard to express the relief I feel that this man will be the president soon. I realize that's what I feel above all else: relief.
I may disagree with him at times, and criticize him at times, but his great gift is showing that he does not expect people to change their convictions in order to find common areas of agreement.

Stipulating that I'm probably looking forward to the transition as much as the next guy, this kind of statement has a familiar ring to it.

I remember where I was at the last presidential transition -- working at the U.S. Treasury. And what was interesting was that, despite the fact that Treasury had done very well under the Clinton administration in general and Larry Summers in particular, there really was a feeling of anticipation about Bush taking over.

Why? Because after eight years of one administration, even the stuff that used to seem endearing becomes annoying. The Clinton staffers chronic lateness to meetings, for example, drove the Treasury people batty. They welcomed a the more orderly schedule of the Bushies -- right up until the moment they started f%$#ing up policy.

My point is not to say that Obama is going to be like George W. Bush. My point is that, until he starts accumulating a record as president, one should take these platitudes with more than a pinch of salt. [And here I thought your point was that you were bitter that you haven't been asked to meet and greet Obama!--ed.]

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Read it and weep

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - 5:52 AM

Cullen Murphy, Todd Purdum, and Philippe Sands have compiled a long oral history of the Bush administration in Vanity Fair. It's depressing reading, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. The obvious reasons are the monumental clusterf%$ks committed by this administration over the past eight years. The not-so-obvious reasons are that Vanity Fair needlessly stacked the deck against the administration. They talked to a lot of people, but very few current supporters of the administration. This was stupid, because even with a few more supportive interviews, the history itself is just damning. Still, it will be too easy for some to dismiss. Even with a stacked deck, this is very sobering reading. Two quotes stand out. The first comes from Henry Paulson, who sounds like a broken man:

I easily could imagine and expected there to be financial turmoil. But the extent of it, O.K., I was naïve in terms of—I knew a lot about regulation but not nearly as much as I needed to know, and I knew very little about regulatory powers and authorities. I just had not gone into it in that kind of detail.

Sweet Jesus. Finally, the last lines in the story, from Matthew Dowd:

You know, the headline in his presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It’s missed opportunity, missed opportunity.

UPDATE: Just one more quote -- because it's by a sympathetic oberver of Bus and therefore more devastating. It's from Noelia Rodriguez, Laura Bush's press secretary:

I wish that more people could have seen the president the way I experienced him. Even if you don’t agree with him or respect his opinions or his decisions—strip that away, if you’re able to—he is a caring human being. I brought my mom to the White House, to get a tour the day before Thanksgiving. The president came in and greeted her—it was a total surprise. And on the spot he invited us to go to Camp David for Thanksgiving. Of course, we went, and it was Disneyland for adults. We went to chapel services before dinner. I remember we got there early. A few minutes later the president walks in with Mrs. Bush and the family, and you could see him looking around, and he sees my mom in the distance, and he literally shouts at her from across the chapel, “Grace, come sit over here with me.” And at dinner, again, he sees her, and he says, “Grace, you’re going to sit over here next to me.” And he tilted the chair against the table so that nobody would take her place.

In the context of screw-up after screw-up, this is like the standard media quote from the next-door neigbor of a felon saying, "Gosh, George was always nice to me." ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, if Vanity Fair had managed to cram every screw-up like this one into the essay, it might have been an even longer history.

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The Retrac administration?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, August 11, 2008 - 1:00 PM

Fareed Zakaria has a cover story in Newsweek on how the Bush administration's current foreign policy ain't what it used to be:

A broad shift in America's approach to the world is justified and overdue. Bush's basic conception of a "global War on Terror," to take but the most obvious example, has been poorly thought-through, badly implemented, and has produced many unintended costs that will linger for years if not decades. But blanket criticism of Bush misses an important reality. The administration that became the target of so much passion and anger—from Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone—is not quite the one in place today. The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed. This has happened without acknowledgment—which is partly what drives critics crazy—and it's often been done surreptitiously. It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure; the old way simply wasn't working. But for whatever reasons and through whichever path, the foreign policies in place now are more sensible, moderate and mainstream. In many cases the next president should follow rather than reverse them.

Read the whole thing, and not just because Zakaria cites your humble blogger. In some ways, this Bush administration is the mirror image of the Carter administration's experience in foreign policy (hence the title of this post). In both cases, a new administration rejected both the prior administration's grand strategy -- and spurned the intellectual traditions of their own party -- to chart out a new approach to foreign policy. Both of these new approaches In both cases, these new approaches yielded more failures than successes. And, in both cases, the president altered his approach in response to these failures -- to the point where the foreign policies of their last year in office strongly resembled the status quo they had inherited. Of course, the difference, crudely put, is that Carter moved from dovish to hawkish, while Bush has done the reverse.

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EXPLORE:U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, BUSH, CARTER