DUBYA IS BAD. HIS FATHER WAS WORSE.

(Excerpted from the New Republic on-line edition of Dec 27)

Sins of the Father
by Tom Frank

Only at TNR Online | Post date 12.27.04
 E-mail this article


In the late 1990s, as Americans found themselves learning more than they cared to know about Arkansas courtship rituals, the name Bush began to inspire sentimental feelings. Bill Clinton's predecessor, it was said, had at least shown respect for the office. If he'd never managed to achieve the common touch, neither had he been accused of disrobing and offering suggestions such as "Kiss it" within minutes of making someone's acquaintance. In 1999, The New York Times noted that Bush I was now "basking in the glow of a surprisingly early, and positive, reassessment of his stewardship."


Oddly enough, the arrival of George W. Bush didn't quell the longing for George H.W. Bush; in fact, for some Americans, it only intensified it. Just six months into the younger Bush's presidency, Fareed Zakaria was already writing in Time that Dubya should "embrace his own family values" and emulate his father, who was, in fact, "a pretty good president." Once Dubya began to anger much of the world, others chimed in. The elder Bush was "a master of personal diplomacy," reminisced columnist Maureen Dowd, an "old-school internationalist who ceaselessly tried to charm allies as U.N. ambassador and in the White House." Her colleague Thomas Friedman took Bush nostalgia even further. Days before the 2004 election, Friedman wrote, "The more I look back on the elder Bush ... the more I find to admire." He concluded: "Yes, next Tuesday, vote for the real political heir to George H.W. Bush. I'm sure you know who that is." (Friedman meant John Kerry.)


This was, really, going a bit far. Even in a world where the spectrum of political belief is bounded by the poles of Bush I and Bush II--a world in which, evidently, Friedman and others are now dwelling--surely some norms, such as avoiding nostalgia for our worst chief executives, must be respected. True, whatever your political beliefs--liberal, conservative, libertarian, other--Dubya has done something to bother you. Anyone who invades Afghanistan, occupies Iraq, expands Medicare, passes No Child Left Behind, flouts the Kyoto Protocol, pushes a Constitutional amendment on marriage, sinks the dollar, cuts taxes, and proposes dynamiting the New Deal is bound to step on a toe every so often. But is our current president bad enough to warrant something as drastic as the rehabilitation of Bush I?


Perhaps we should cheer up. In reality, there's something worse than the mix of ideological belligerence and lack of scruples that characterizes Dubya's administration. That would be the mix of cynicism, demagoguery, and ineffectiveness that characterized the presidency of his father