A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  The realization by war supporters that the president’s primary prewar justification was false, and that their good-faith support for him had been exploited to enable an agenda having nothing to do with terrorism, led to a sense of deep betrayal and irreversible mistrust. From that point forward, many reasonable people were unwilling to place faith in the accuracy of the president’s statements.

  Making matters worse for the president, the definitive finding that there were no WMDs came at the time when the occupation of Iraq—which Americans had been led to expect would be quick and easy—was plagued by chaos, violence, and increasingly high American casualties. That there was no end in sight was becoming rapidly apparent. And rather than making progress, Iraq began to resemble the lawless and violence-plagued state that—at the time of the Afghanistan invasion—Americans were told was the climate most likely to breed terrorism.

  The revelation of no WMDs, coming as Iraq was falling apart, thus had the devastating effect of undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of the president as well as his administration’s competence. Those two attributes—personal honesty and competence in foreign affairs—had been the pillars of the president’s political strength, and both were subjected to severe assault by the “Duelfer Report” and the accompanying deterioration of Iraq. Polls thus demonstrated not only that previously pro-Bush Americans were expressing disapproval of his performance as president, but that their assessment of the president as a person—his honesty, reliability, and judgment—was dramatically worsening.

  According to the Pew Research Center, in September 2003, 62 percent of Americans believed President Bush was trustworthy. By July 2005, that number had dropped to 49 percent, and by March 2006, the number had plummeted to 40 percent.

  Similarly, when asked to describe President Bush using only one word, the leading response in February 2005 was honest, given by 38 percent of respondents. The word incompetent finished a distant fifth, garnering only 14 percent. But only a year later, in March 2006, those numbers reversed. Incompetent became the leading response with 29 percent, while honest tumbled to sixth place, with only 14 percent—tied with the word liar (14 percent) and behind the epithet idiot (17 percent). As Pew put it in a March 2006 report accompanying its polling data:

  President Bush’s declining image also is reflected in the single-word descriptions people use to describe their impression of the president. Three years ago, positive one-word descriptions of Bush far outnumbered negative ones. Over the past two years, the positive-negative balance has been roughly equal. But the one-word characterizations have turned decidedly negative since last July.

  Currently, 48% use a negative word to describe Bush compared with just 28% who use a positive term, and 10% who use neutral language.

  The 2007 Pew poll was even worse for the president. Incompetent continued to be the leading adjective, this time from 34 percent of the respondents. Second was arrogant, the adjective selected by 25 percent; the word idiot continued to attract a sizable portion as well (19 percent).

  The Duelfer Report was issued in October 2004—less than one month prior to the 2004 election. As a result, the unraveling of the Bush presidency was still in its initial stage when America decided to re-elect him. Bush’s approval rating, after remaining near or above 60 percent for most of 2002 and 2003, descended to the 50 percent level in 2004—generally considered the danger zone for the re-election prospects of incumbent presidents—and it hovered there throughout the year, up to and including the election.

  Opinion polls in the weeks before the election reflected a dead heat between Bush and John Kerry. Ultimately, Bush won the 2004 race by a popular-vote margin of 2.7 percentage points, the smallest margin of victory for any incumbent president since 1828. As the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein noted after the election: “Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4–5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.” And just as was true in 2000, Bush’s 2004 victory was dependent upon a narrow victory in a single state, this time in Ohio.

  Most remarkable about the narrowness of Bush’s 2004 victory is the vast array of overwhelming electoral advantages he enjoyed as an incumbent War President. Those advantages ought to have made re-election nearly assured.

  Incumbent American presidents rarely lose under any circumstances. But Americans have never voted a president out of office during wartime, having comfortably re-elected all four previous wartime presidents who ran again (Madison, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nixon).

  Beyond those towering inherent advantages, Bush barely squeaked by despite running against John Kerry, one of the most politically ungifted major party nominees in several decades; despite Kerry’s running an inept and passive presidential campaign, leading former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to call the campaign’s failure to attack Bush’s record “one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics” and despite a significant financial advantage. Even with all of those formidable advantages, facing a weak opponent and an unskillful campaign, the War President, after four years of governing, won only two states in 2004 that he did not take in 2000 (Iowa and New Mexico) and even lost New Hampshire for a net gain of only one state.

  Since his re-election, the president’s popularity has continued to decline steadily—at times even precipitously—to the point where George Bush has reached historic levels of sustained unpopularity. To put the collapse of the president’s popularity into context, at the time Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency after being battered for two years by the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s approval rating had plummeted to 25 percent—a mere seven points lower than the 32 percent approval rating registered by President Bush multiple times throughout 2006. On January 21, 2007, when CBS News issued a poll placing the president’s approval rating at 28 percent, the right-wing website Drudge Report posted a headline which read: “Bush poll ratings fall to Nixon levels.”

  On the eve of the president’s 2007 State of the Union address, Bloomberg News reported that “President George W. Bush’s approval ratings are now the lowest for any president the day before a State of the Union speech since Richard Nixon in 1974.” And unlike previous presidents, most of whom reached all-time approval-rating lows in the mid-30s, George Bush’s unpopularity has been sustained, spending virtually all of 2006 and the early months of 2007 mired in the mid-to-low 30s. The only convincing comparison one can make is the collapse of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, which—like Bush’s collapse—was tied not to some fleeting event or scandal, but to a deeply unpopular war that dragged on without end.

  Even as early as the end of 2005, Gary Langer of ABC News noted the historic nature of George Bush’s unpopularity and drew the comparison this way:

  An increasingly unpopular war, an ethics cloud, and broad economic discontent have pushed public opinion of the Bush administration from bad to worse, infecting not only the president’s ratings on political issues but his personal credentials for honesty and leadership as well….

  A striking feature of the president’s predicament is the intensity of sentiment against him. Just 20 percent of Americans “strongly” approve of his work in office, the fewest of his career; more than twice as many, 47 percent, strongly disapprove, the most yet seen….

  Bush’s troubles stand out, in large part because they’re rooted not just in economic concerns but in an increasingly unpopular war. That invites comparisons to Lyndon B. Johnson, whose approval rating suffered each year as the country became more enmeshed in Vietnam—dropping in Gallup data from 75 percent on average in 1964, to 43 percent in 1967 and 1968. Bush, for his part, has gone from an average of 73 percent approval in 2000 and 2001 to 46 percent, on average, so far this year. The trend lines are strikingly similar.

  This dramatic, wholesale erosion of support for the president continued after Langer drew the LBJ comparison and it has now been sustained over a mu
ch longer period of time. It spans the ideological and demographic spectrum and appears largely irreversible. Analyzing a February 2006 poll showing the president with new lows in approval and popularity ratings, political scientist Richard Stoll of Rice University observed that it “suggests that he’s pretty much down to his core supporters out there…and everyone else has left” (emphasis added).

  Though catalyzed by the catastrophe in Iraq, this collapse had plenty of other authors. From the outset, the president’s second term was plagued by a series of embarrassing domestic failures that, as an accompaniment to the unraveling of Iraq, exacerbated perceptions of Bush’s startling ineptitude. The president’s campaign to overhaul Social Security—his flamboyantly touted second-term “legacy” program—flopped from the start, his proposals pushed away even by his own party, which made him appear weak and ineffective. The failed Supreme Court nomination of his loyal aide Harriet Miers was fueled almost entirely by his own supporters and further eroded the powerful, almost omnipotent aura that had surrounded him during the heyday of his first term. The palpable sloth and indifference that characterized his reaction to the Katrina disaster chipped away further at his image of strength and Americans’ confidence in his ability to “protect” them. The fiasco over his attempt to turn over America’s port operations to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates even raised questions about whether he was sufficiently committed to protecting the country against the threat of Islamic terrorism, the only asset which had, until that point, been immune from attack. As the president’s second term slogged along, his few remaining strengths were gradually diluted until they disappeared completely.

  But it was the disaster in Iraq that provided the essential framework in which all of these other failures unfolded. There is certainly a good argument to make that the nonexistence of WMDs was so harmful to the president only because the war that those weapons “justified” had been managed so ineptly, to the point where America actually appeared to be losing. Many Americans, perhaps most, hate a losing war more than they hate an unjust war. To be burdened with an image of weakness and defeat is arguably more damaging for an American president than to be revealed as dishonest. A substantial bulk of the Iraq-fueled hostility toward the president had as much to do with the fact that he failed to win the war—that he seemed to be losing—as it did with the fact that he justified the war in the first place with pretexts that were revealed to be false. But in all events, the confirmed nonexistence of WMDs did not mean merely that the war was sold on false pretenses. The revelation itself was a failure, a defeat. It brought embarrassment to the United States and vindication to war opponents. And even many Americans who were not bothered by the invasion were deeply disturbed by the humiliation when America appeared in the eyes of the world as incapable of doing anything right in its attempt to subdue Iraq.

  By early 2006, the vast majority of Americans irreversibly opposed the war in Iraq—the centerpiece of the Bush presidency—and believed that it had been a mistake to invade. Worse, Americans largely believed that they were misled into supporting the invasion of Iraq not by virtue of erroneous intelligence but due to deliberate deceit. The Washington Post reported at the end of 2005: “A clear majority—55 percent—now says the administration deliberately misled the country in making its case for war with Iraq—a conflict that an even larger majority say is not worth the cost.”

  This staggering unpopularity is all the more striking considering its contrast with the political omnipotence the president enjoyed for the first two and a half years after the 9/11 attacks. On one level, this near-complete reversal is difficult to understand because the president has not changed his approach or his worldview in the slightest. But on another, the collapse of his support is due precisely to the fact that the president’s governing approach and mind-set never change, even when his policies are glaring failures and the issues he is forced to address are entirely unsuitable to his worldview.

  It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the Bush presidency imploded, but the November 2006 midterm elections provide a potent illustration. The Republican Party’s smashing electoral defeat in the 2006 midterms was as rare and as mammoth as was that party’s midterm victory in 2002. For only the third time in sixty years, there was a change in control of the Congress, as Democrats took over both the House and the Senate.

  The magnitude of the Republican losses was staggering. The Democrats defeated six Republican senators to take control of the Senate, and picked up a total of thirty-one House seats. Six governorships switched from Republican control to Democratic, returning majority control of governorships back to the Democrats, by a margin of 28 to 22.

  More notably still, not one incumbent House Democrat lost, and therefore not one single Republican challenger won—the first time since 1938 that one of the two major parties failed to defeat a single House incumbent. All incumbent Senate Democrats also won. Thus, the 2006 midterm election was only the second election in U.S. history in which one of the major parties failed to defeat even a single incumbent from the other party.

  Dissatisfaction with the president’s Republican Party was so pervasive that it extended down to multiple state races. All incumbent Democratic governors won re-election as well. Democrats seized control of four different state legislatures previously under Republican control, while Republicans failed to take over any Democratic-run state legislatures. The 2006 rejection by American voters of George Bush’s Republican Party was total and evident across-the-board in every region outside of the Deep South.

  With that humiliating development, the collapse of the Bush presidency was virtually complete. By the end of 2006, vast majorities of Americans believed that the president was untrustworthy, incompetent, and even unlikable. They believed he misled them into supporting the invasion of Iraq not by virtue of erroneous intelligence but through deliberate deceit. Americans’ dislike for George Bush was so widespread and intense that it infected the entire Republican Party.

  THE ESTABLISHMENT REBELS

  After the American electorate signaled its profound dissatisfaction with the Bush presidency, and as events in Iraq continued their downward spiral, even the Washington Establishment, including its Republican standard-bearers, abandoned the president. It is as though the country collectively acknowledged the severity of America’s crisis the administration had inflicted and resolved to take action, leaving the president standing alone—weak, isolated, and unpopular—as his war lay in ruins. By the time the president unveiled his so-called Iraq “surge” strategy at the beginning of 2007, the war in Iraq was spoken of not as a mere mistake or serious problem, but as a strategic disaster of historic proportions.

  Republican senator Chuck Hagel, at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was testifying, called the escalation “morally wrong” and declared: “I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” The day after President Bush announced his “surge” strategy, Al Gore declared it “the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States.”

  Such rhetoric suddenly began issuing from even moderate, establishment-defending journalists and pundits whose principal function typically is to recite Beltway conventional wisdom and the political orthodoxies prevailing among the Beltway elite. The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a vigorous champion of moderation in all things—policy, politics, and rhetoric—wrote that the president’s January 2007 “surge” speech revealed “a presidency in eclipse: He has lost the House and Senate; he has lost the public on the war; and he has attached his presidency to a riderless horse.” Similarly, CBS News’ Dick Meyer observed:

  Rarely in our history has a president made a speech like this—an announcement that a large number of American soldiers will be sent to a foreign war—with less public, political, and international support. The president really is
alone.

  In war and politics, an essential measure of power is allies. Bush has few, and they are not powerful.

  By 2007, unrestrained attacks on the president and his policies had become commonplace and were but a symptom of the wholesale insurrection by the Washington Establishment against the presidency that it had propped up for so long. The most surprising indignity suffered by the Bush presidency—and perhaps the most harmful as well—was the unabashed critical conclusion issued by the blue-chip, bipartisan panel, the so-called Iraq Study Group, or Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was composed of some of Washington’s most institutionally respected figures. Commissions of this sort are typically assembled in response to problems with the expectation that they will recommend, at most, incremental changes on the margins.

  But the sheer scope of Bush’s Iraq failure, and the grave danger posed to the United States by its continuation (let alone escalation), did not permit the commission the luxury of such tempered and polite findings. Instead, the report was emphatic, at times even scathing, in its assessment that the war had gone terribly awry.

  The day the report was issued, the commission’s co-chair, Lee Hamilton, summarized its conclusion: “The situation in Iraq today is grave and deteriorating” the report itself warned: “If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe.” The report never referenced the possibility of “victory,” instead aiming for efforts to stabilize the country in order for all American troops not necessary for force protection to be out of Iraq by early 2008.