Read it and weep

"Missed Opportunity" -- wasn't that the headline for the Clinton years? And, it looks as if that may well be the headline for the Obama years too.

[...] danieldrezner.com, No More Mister Nice Blog Technorati Tags: Paleo-Conservatives ,Politics ,Opinion [...]

Dan,

You say

"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."

So are you telling me that all of the following are no longer current supporters of the administration:

1)David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
2)Michael Brown, director of fema, which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security
3)Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary
4)Margaret Spellings, Bush’s domestic-policy adviser and later secretary of education
5)Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president
6)Mary Matalin, assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president
7)Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign
8)Ed Gillespie, campaign strategist and later counselor to the president
9)Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush
10)Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to Laura Bush

There are also a quite a number of other Bush administration insiders that they talked to, e.g Jay Garner, Scott McCleelan, Lawrence Wilkerson, Henry Paulson. If all of the above are now no longer supporters of the administration, that's a very telling point in and of itself. Overall, apart from the internationals, there are very few people on that list who could fairly be considered partisan in terms of politics against the administration in my understanding.
Which may be limited, admittedly.

It seems to be a pretty extensive list of people. If anyone dismisses the article because it doesn't contain current supporters of the administration, then I think they are kidding themselves.

Which current supporters of the administration would you have included?

cheers

Martin

Hindsight is always 20/20. By definition, the unanticipated is not foreseen. And then you kick yourself, thinking "Shoulda, coulda, woulda." Does that make Paulson a broken man? Not so much.

Bias against Bush in the media? Say it isn't so!

Of all the people deserving blame for the meltdown, Bush is *way* down the list. Dodd and Frank should have resigned in disgrace to start with, but that would require our leaders to have a bit of integrity and actually care about the good of the country.

Recently I've wished we had a parliamentary system so we could just dissolve the abomination that our government has become.

Of all the people deserving blame for the meltdown, Bush is *way* down the list.

utterly amazing...

Dodd and Frank should have resigned in disgrace to start with, but that would require our leaders to have a bit of integrity and actually care about the good of the country.

Really... I'm curious Justin, just how do you think this meltdown occurred? Details please.

You know, JDMcKay, Justin has a point (under his hat, I suspect). There is plenty of blame to go around. This was a long slow - but deliberate - process that really kicked into gear with the Reagan years. Bush just happened to be fiddling at the finale - the coda, really - when Rome finally burnt to the ground. We've come a very long way, baby, from the days when Milton Friedman mused that "Nixon was the most socialist president of the 20th century".

Martin: Kuo, Brown and Dowd have been critics of President Bush for several years now. The quotes from many of the other loyalists (like Matalin) disappear after the first year. It might have been appropriate to have also talked to loyal outsiders as well (Tony Blair, William Kristol, etc.)

The stacking of the deck seems particularly noteworthy in talking about the surge in Iraq. Bush deseves some credit there for going against the policy consensus and pursuing a strategy that has improved the situation in Iraq, but there's barely a mention.

It might be the case that the true loyalists simply didn't want to talk to Vanity Fair.

@6

This was a long slow - but deliberate - process that really kicked into gear with the Reagan years. Bush just happened to be fiddling at the finale - the coda, really - when Rome finally burnt to the ground.

Well, unfortunately that's about as specific as most US citizen's understanding goes. There is cause and affect, however, and there is huge volume of data on complicit actions.

That even at current extreme situation same o'le pundits are working overtime to mis-inform... same crew that has steered us of the cliff is pointing elsewhere for blame, and given their success in the past along w/very ignorant US public I have no doubt they'll do it again.

Obama has made fatal mistake in not defining cause of our econ woes right out of the chute. The mis-information MSM knee capping crew is in force and it's going to be cement shoes for him.

This got me thinking: to what extent is, say, the uselessness of OSHA or most other agencies his fault? Obviously he takes a share of the blame for both legal and political reasons. He takes a bigger share of blame because he controlled his party so well and his party controlled Congress most of the time, so the executive branch was not as torn between masters as it can be.

But his real sin was to do what he was elected to do! Meaning, what we now attribute to incompetence was down to his decision to do what his people/movement/friends/networks wanted him to do. The President typically knows next to nothing about what is going on in the federal bureaucracy. But the President does tap into networks and processes that fill in the thousands people who do stuff down there. Bush quite naturally tapped the lobbyist-think-tank network conservatives have built, and which has roots in Republican elites around the country. They went into office and did what they said that they would do, which was convert regulatory capture and government failure from a problem to an objective.

So we can't focus most of the screw-ups on Bush: he takes the foreign policy biggies, but OSHA, Katrina, the erosion of civil service professionalism, and lesser known disasters like what is happening at CDC are the fault of the people we would have got with pretty much *any* Republican president.

"Oh, no, my Lord. Parts of it are good." Is that your complaint, Dan?

For me, the money quote is Matthew Dowd's:

Matthew Dowd: Karl wasn’t receptive to ideas that would’ve called the country to certain things and brought them to a common purpose and a sense of shared sacrifice. Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good.

The original sin of the Bush (43) Administration is that (literally) war was the continuation of politics by other means. Everything, including the invasion and conquest of an independent country, was put in the service of political gain.

Andrew: No, my complaint is that it is conservatives who need to read this to truly comprehend the God-awful nature of the administration. Since there are very few sympathetic voices included, however, it will be easy for conservatives to engage in cognitive lock-out and blame it on media bias.

OK. I understand.

However, I'm with J K Galbraith on this one: "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, most people get started on the proof."

Part of that comment is addressed to the people who will engage in "cognitive lock-out" (nice phrase) in response to the Vanity Fair article.

But there's a larger problem, I think, for conservatives to engage with: what is the proper role for government in addressing a nation's challenges? The dominant strand in conservative thinking on government for the last thirty years or so has been that government is more likely to be a problem rather than a solution, that markets are invariably better at allocating resources than government agents, and lower taxes and fewer regulations create upper bounds on the future set of choices available to societies.

Not only the current financial crisis, but also the larger performance of this Administration, show the dangers of this kind of approach. Competence in administration is valuable. Regulation isn't a toxin in the body politic, it's an essential function. Will we still see conservatives who ask for 1980s solutions to the challenges of the 2010s?

It recently occurred to me that, if Bush had entered office with the expressed purpose of doing as much damage as possible to the United States, we might actually, given the staggering incompetence of this administration, be better off now.

No doubt Bush led the pack, but it's the Republican economic philosophy that proved to be a disaster. That philosophy was (and, astoundingly, still is being) supported by the entire party.

The roots of the failure may be with Milt Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Ron Reagan, but Greenspan and the entire Republican congress were the creators and enthusiastic backers of this disaster. Today they are all in denial, spinning furiously and attempting to pass the buck.

The worst of it is their inability to admit that their economic philosophy has been a failure means they have to keep promoting more of the same as a solution!

So this is one of those posts where a second-rate academic, who prides himself on his own areas of ignorance (like not knowing what a surety bond is), pretends to be smarter than the head of Goldman Sachs? Spare me. God, professors are a contemptible bunch.

Well, unfortunately that’s about as specific as most US citizen’s understanding goes.

It helps to have been around during Eisenhower's admin. I was young but I know what a real conservative Republican looks like. It looks like a Democrat these days. Even Goldwater would be voting Democratic these days. There are no conservatives in today's GOP. Just extremists and radical reactionaries who are closer to Birchers from the period. And the Birchers were convinced Ike was a commie mole. Today's Birchers are even stranger, as if that were possible, and off into Ron Paulsville. This is what a real conservative Republican looks like today:

Pete McCloskey

And he couldn't get elected running as a Republican trying to defeat that hack Pombo in the primaries so he finally switched parties. Pombo lost to a Democrat. People who vote Republican would probably call McCloskey a Marxist today. It's an involuntary reflex. A nervous tic.

@7: "The stacking of the deck seems particularly noteworthy in talking about the surge in Iraq. Bush deserves some credit there for going against the policy consensus and pursuing a strategy that has improved the situation in Iraq, but there’s barely a mention."

Out of a piece that's about 20,000 words,

-- Shinseki's pre-invasion troop estimate and subsequent firing gets about 200 words.

-- The lack of plan for post-invasion Iraq and associated looting gets about 500 words.

-- The decision to disband the Iraqi army gets about 300 words.

By comparison, the surge gets about 200 words. That doesn't seem wildly out of line.

There's nothing "devastating" to Bush about Ms Rodriguez's kind words about him.

What is so horrible about the past 8 years?

9-11 was not his fault; obviously.

There were no attacks since, SHOCKING everyone.

Katrina was a failure of Democratic local and state government first and foremost (they being responsible for evacuation and first response) that stunned FEMA who are used to dealing with competent local and state governments.

Everyone thought Hussein had WMD so invading was the responsible act given his history. He did not have them but was trying to get them and had the resources and concealment capability to get them. Eventually he would have had to been removed and fortunately for our soldiers it, to our surprise, was before he could use WMD on them. The Iraq War (and the Afghanistan War) are historically military masterpieces of invasion and occupation when compared to other similiar wars, especially in that region with that demographic. There were mistakes as in any war, but the war went well. So the war decision was absolutely right given the reasonable and bipartisan intelligence (Tennant was Clinton's CIA head before he was Bush II's). The invasion was better conducted now than later. And we won.

The USA economy has performed better than the industrialized world; and the mortgage crisis was a bipartisan failure that arose from a misguided attempt to provide, overwhelmingly poor Democrats, with homes.

Unemployment was kept at historically low levels.

At least Bush II has made progress on thwarting the education ruining teacher's and education unions monopoly on public school provision. Obama will further entrench those interests at the expense of our children.

In passing, every complaint about Bush II's "imperial" presidency is laughable compared to the ultra vires or outrageous acts of the Lincoln and FDR administrations. They make Cheney look like a boy scout. You do know that FDR put US citizens in internment camps, right?

Bush II is one of the top few presidents this country has ever had.

Obama's victory is great for Bush II's legacy. Watch how few of Bush II's policies Obama actually changes.

TOH

TOH, I thought about refuting you point by point but I just can't get up the energy. History will refute you within a year or two. Your lies will not be remembered with any fondness.

Which are lies? Perhaps you are just too used to the radical Democratic echo chamber.

Not one is a lie.

I forgot to add one thing; Democrats attained control of Congress in 2006 back when the economy was working smoothly. 2007 and 2008 are as much theirs as Bush II's. To share power is to share blame.

And to have power is to have blame. Now that Democrats have nearly absolute power, we will see what they do.

Like Truman, Bush II's prospects are all positive historically. First, it can't get worse for him. Second, he has been a great president; when actual success is examined, better than FDR. FDR failed to stop Hitler initially (when Hitler re-armed in 1935 in violation of Germany's Treaty of Berlin 1922 with the USA) and also LOST the war in Europe. In 1939 Eastern Europe was free. In 1945 it was ruled by the fascist Soviet Union. That is losing. Not only is FDR's incometence to blame for WW II; he failed to win it.

TOH

TOH, if I actually responded to your babble it would tend to lend it legitimacy. I want to merely point out that you are being utterly ridiculous and nobody who thinks seriously about the topics will pay any attention to your silly rants.

Not sure how many readers of this post are fans of Larry David's HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but the episode at Camp David with the staffer's Mom sounds straight out of one of the "Ted and Mary" episodes, where Larry tries to ingratiate himself with Mary Steenburgen's Mom, and is equally creepy, though even moreso given that we're talking about the president of the country.