Here at home, Bush has governed more along the lines of Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, bewhiskered and now forgotten Republicans of the Gilded Age. Like them, he has devoted his energy to keeping his party’s most powerful constituents happy, providing them with regular feedings, opening the White House to business lobbies, and turning his congressional majority into a patronage machine at the expense of fiscal sanity and simple fairness. His legislative agenda projects nothing like the ambitious idealism of his foreign policy; at home, the global crusader remains a crony capitalist. In last week’s debate, Bush’s solution for the most pressing domestic problems of his Presidency was a kind of verbal shrug. What to do about the steep drop in the value of the minimum wage? “Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act,” the President insisted, in a non sequitur. Who’s to blame for skyrocketing health-insurance costs? “Gosh, I sure hope it’s not the Administration,” he said with a chuckle. According to Bush’s philosophy of government, America’s ability to assert its will for the greater good around the world is enormous. In Toledo—well, there are limits.

The contradiction in being T.R. abroad and Rutherford B. Hayes at home has plagued Bush’s governance ever since the terror attacks. He has lacked the vocabulary and perhaps the desire to summon a national community and to ask it for sacrifice and commitment in the fight against the foreign enemy. His energy policy, his fixation on tax cuts, and his sweetheart contracts with friendly corporations have directly undermined the war effort. The deeper effect of a narrow, partisan domestic agenda has been to polarize the country when unity was required.

There’s a case to be made that it hardly matters how eloquent or effective John Kerry was at the Democratic National Convention last week. What matters infinitely more is that George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since Richard Nixon, and even mediocrity would be an improvement. Indeed, if one regards the Bush Administration’s sins of governance—its distortion of intelligence in a time of crisis, its grotesque indulgence of the rich at the expense of the rest, its arrogant dissolution of American prestige and influence abroad, its heedless squandering of the world’s resources—as worse than the third-rate burglary and second-rate coverup of thirty years ago, then President Bush is in a league only with the likes of Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.

Posted by: Jonathan Singer / 11:16 PM | Basie! Home