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Rewriting the Bush Legacy? Already???
By Brian | February 8, 2009 | Share on Facebook
You know, George W. Bush told us all that history would judge him differently after he left office. I had sort of assumed he meant more than three weeks after he left, though.
First, Jeff Porten tells me that NPR is reporting better than expected results about Bush’s unmanned, CIA-directed air-strikes into Pakistan. “It is now possible,” NPR tells us, “to foresee a ‘complete al-Qaida defeat’ in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan.”
Then, I read that the 2006 Lancet Study, which estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 2% of Iraq’s pre-war population (around 655,000) has been publicly discredited in a “highly unusual rebuke” by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. It seems that Lancet, which received more than half it’s funding from Democratic super-fundraiser George Soros, refuses to tell anyone how they arrived at their numbers. Megan McArdle goes into some more detail, quoting the World Heath Organization as saying that if Lancet were correct, then several other organizations would have had to miss 87-90% of the violent civilian deaths in Iraq. WHO calls this “highly improbable, given the internal and external consistency of the data and the much larger sample size and quality-control measures taken” by the other groups.
And then today, I’m reading that President Obama is expanding George W. Bush’s much maligned faith-based initiative programs. The Salt Lake Tribune:
President Obama announced . . . his White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister, will direct the office, which Obama said will work with nonprofit organizations “both secular and faith-based” and help them determine how to make a bigger impact in their cities, learn their obligations under the law and cut through government red tape.
The office expands and redefines a similar office established by President George W. Bush. Focused primarily on faith-based initiatives, the Bush office sparked constitutional questions about whether the separation of church and state would be preserved, particularly if groups receiving tax dollars sought to hire on the basis of religion.
Before signing the executive order creating the office, Obama told the annual National Prayer Breakfast the program would not show favoritism to any religious group and would adhere to a strict church-state separation.
To be clear, I’m thrilled that President Obama is not afraid to capitalize on an idea from his predecessor’s administration that he feels has merit. I’m sure it would be politically expedient for him to reverse course on anything related to George W. Bush, and pooh-pooh any news that implies success on Bush’s behalf. The fact that he hasn’t done so suggests that his interests lie in what’s best for America, not what’s best for Barack Obama or for the Democratic Party.
That said, I’m glad (and not entirely shocked) to hear that a few things were going better than we expected come January 21, 2009.
Topics: Political Rantings | 4 Comments »
Re Afghanistan, I’ve said elsewhere that there are several dogs that aren’t barking on this topic, and I’ll be curious to see if a) this turns out to be substantively true, and b) who the unnamed sources are that NPR quoted. (And c), if we determine that this is a leak from Defense Bush holdovers to polish his image, as I suspect, whether that will have one iota of impact on NPR’s undeserved reputation as a liberal news outlet. I think I can already answer this one.)
Briefly, though, two of the dogs that aren’t barking: 1) everything I’ve ever read about the application of air power is that it can only be used to win a battle if it’s used massively and indiscriminately — e.g., firebombing of Dresden, or napalming of Vietnamese jungles. If we theorize that FATA insurgents are integrated with civilian areas, you can’t have total air destruction without massive civilian casualties. 2) No one in the Obama administration, AFAIK, is saying anything about a rapid win in Afghanistan, whereas an announcement about pulling those troops home would be very popular at the moment.
Re faith-based initiatives, the lede that you buried concerns the separation of church and state, and the lack of preferences for any one religion. There is plenty of documentation that Bush’s goals with the faith-based initiative were to push Christian and conservative values. For those of us who recall that the separation of church and state is a Constitutional issue, Obama’s policy regarding the new office is as much a “redefinition and expansion” of Bush’s idea as his policy on torture is a “redefinition and expansion” of Bush’s allowance of it.
Of course, if you want to give Obama bipartisan credit for keeping what was worthwhile about the Bush faith initiative while repudiating the 90% of it that was reprehensible, I’m not going to stop you. But a hypothetical clarification: “feed the children” is a good program, not a revision of “feed the children to the wolves.”
Re: Afghanistan – you’re instincts seem to have gotten the better of you. You’re now overtly disagreeing with your own post. Note that I remain non-commital on which Porten I agree with (like you, I don’t believe I have all the facts). My point, though, was the lack of mass rebuttal to a “things are going well” story in the media. That is a big change from before inauguration day.
Re: Faith-based initiatives, the article you link to is excellent – detailing much more clearly than I was able to my original point about the Bush administration’s inability to control the message.
That said, I can only assume it wasn’t the article you intended to link to. The word “Christian” does not appear in the article at all (the word “Catholic” appears only once, and in this context:
As for your claim that Obama’s policy is as much a redefinition/expansion of Bush’s idea as his torture policy, Obama himself has disagreed with you numerous times – both on the campaign trail and now that he’s taken office. His beef with Bush’s program was that it was under-funded, and didn’t do enough to focus on local neighborhoods, not that it was “conservative” or “Christian.” Here’s Obama from last July, as per USA Today:
To his credit, that’s exactly what he did.
I can’t tell you how disappointed your last paragraph makes me feel. Statements like “if you want to give [my preferred politician] credit for [something I believe to be incorrect], I’m not going to stop you” is precisely the kind of gamesmanship that poisoned the political dialog throughout the Bush years.
It suggests to me that you’re reflexively defending Obama and bashing Bush without a full read of the facts. And the fact that Obama agrees with me on this issue and not you backs me up on that.
You stopped giving Bush a chance early in his presidency. Obama’s giving him a chance now. Whaddayah say we join him, OK?
Lancet: I am in process of evaluating whether the sources I trusted were wrong, and how that changes my opinion. I might also have a few things to say about how my news source for learning that the Lancet study is under attack was the Brian M. Greenberg News Agency.
Faith-based initiatives: I linked to Dilulio mainly because I *love* having to look up how to spell his goddamn name every time I write it. No, that’s not it — I linked to him because he’s a Penn prof, and because as the head of the office we might be able to bypass our usual debate over the validity of our sources. The pull quote that I had in mind was this excerpt:
If you need a better source directly walking through the issues with the program under Bush, try Americans United’s page on the topic. (Hopefully we won’t argue too much about the information’s provenance.)
Just so we’re clear: in my book, feeding, housing, and clothing people is good. Forcing them to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior as the quid pro quo thereof is bad. Dropping that quid pro quo is not a minor revision. More importantly, the prior existence of that quid pro quo is emphatically *not* a problem of “message management” on the part of the Bush administration; it’s a problem of having awful policies.
Personally, I’m in favor of AU’s position that the faith initiative itself is dicey — but given how powerful religion can be as an organizing principle, I’m in wait-and-see mode to see what Obama does with it.
On to the last points, where you completely misunderstand me, and apparently have done so for quite a long while:
I can’t tell you how disappointed your last paragraph makes me feel. Statements like “if you want to give [my preferred politician] credit for [something I believe to be incorrect], I’m not going to stop you” is precisely the kind of gamesmanship that poisoned the political dialog throughout the Bush years.
What I *said* was: “if you want to give Obama bipartisan credit for keeping what was worthwhile about the Bush faith initiative while repudiating the 90% of it that was reprehensible”. What part of this do you think I believe to be incorrect? As I see it, he gutted a Bush program — one that gave money to evangelicals to spread the word of Jesus — and replaced it with something with a similar name and (hopefully) a completely different agenda. A commitment to follow the Constitution reverses the 90% I was in opposition to; I’ve got no problem with funding churches who want to run secular soup kitchens in their basement.
My snarky point was that I don’t see this as a “bipartisan credit” issue; Obama has disemboweled the original goals of Bush’s program, and plans to make it better. I remain skeptical on the latter, but I wholly applaud the former.
Likewise, I’ll mention that I somewhat resent this:
You stopped giving Bush a chance early in his presidency.
Brian, I started Bush’s presidency with a clear belief that he *stole* it. And despite that, considering what the country has been through in the last eight years, I strongly suspect that there were several moments in which Bush had a chance to sway me; you know, those points when we were attacked, or when I was living through anthrax and snipers, or when we went to war, or when the wars went horribly wrong for us and the people who lived there.
I’d say that during times of catastrophe, if you have any normal measure of emotion and patriotism, the president has a chance to lead through inspirational words and deeds. I’d have been quite happy to have been inspired once or twice during some bad times. Bush failed to do so, across the board; if my disdain for him is nearly total, it’s because he well and truly earned it.
The AU page you cited reads as though it was written near the beginning of Bush’s presidency. It consistently uses the word “could” to describe things that could happen, but as it turns out, didn’t (or at least not to a degree that any of us heard about it for eight years). If your opinion is (as AU’s is) that governments should never fund charitable programs at churches, synagogues, or mosques because they could use the money to promote their religion, then I can respect the position, but I disagree completely. Most religious organizations (at least the ones that I’ve had contact with) are made up of good hearted people, and tend to be welcoming and caring for and about people of all faiths. My local synagogue, for example, collected food and clothing for all Katrina victims, not just the Jewish ones.
More to the point, Obama disagrees with you as well. He’s on record during his campaign and during his presidency as praising the Bush program, and expanding it with his recent appointments. His only complaint, it seems, is that not enough of the federal money went to local neighborhood causes, something that he’s vowed to correct.
So, according to him and according to everything I’m reading about his program, he didn’t gut the Bush program at all. And his program doesn’t have a completely different agenda – it has a very similar (but expanded) agenda. And the red herring you throw in about it being unconstitutional is just your opinion – supported only by others who share your opinion.
I think the only difference in your mind is that you trust Obama and you don’t trust Bush. My comment about you giving up on Bush early on wasn’t meant as snark – you certainly weren’t alone in that regard. I’m saying that, like in this instance, your disdain shows through clearly when we have a living, breathing example of a president from the opposing party praising and expanding something that Bush did, and your opinion on the matter changes and/or rationalizes.
For years, I’ve been playing the “it’s not as bad as you’re making it sound” card, and you’ve been mistaking it as a pro-Bush agenda. Thankfully, Obama seems to be doing the same thing, but he’s seen as “gutting and replacing.”
Bottom line: if it’s a good program, I’m glad that he’s doing it. And I’m also glad that we’re both encouraged by it – even if it’s for different reasons.
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