Early Assessment of Bush's Presidency - John Dean

[reprehensor]

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20031107.html

How is Dubya doing as president? Obviously, that's not an unimportant question as the countdown toward Election Day (November 2, 2004) has started.

Most people judge presidents by their own partisan predisposition, assessing presidents along party lines, and then rationalizing their conclusion afterward. Respected presidential scholars, however, typically try to understand the facts before they make their judgment. While they doubtless have partisan feelings, they recognize their bias, and seek to deal with it in making their judgments (somewhat in the way good judges do).

Earlier this year, a conference organized by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School to review the first two and half years of the Bush presidency aimed to make just this kind of impartial assessment. The papers presented and panel discussions, later posted online, speak for themselves.

This work has been further updated and revised as a book: The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment. This book doubtless will be studied closely by the Democrats who want to send Bush back to Texas in January 2005. And it will be read by Republicans, including Bush's aides, advisors, supporters, not merely to get a sense of how history may treat this presidency, but also to garner insights for a second term.

[dweller]

1. good find there, reprehensor

from the bottom of the page:

"In this brief series of columns, I cannot begin to address the insights Daalder and Lindsay provide. But their demolition of one myth seems a good place to start: September 11 did not produce Bush's radical foreign policy. Rather, it gave him reason to implement it.

Bush's foreign policy today -- from his "axis of evil" approach to focusing on rogue states as part of his war on terrorism -- emanates directly from his Vulcan
tutors' thinking. He hinted where he was headed during the campaign, for those who looked closely.

Daalder and Lindsay trace every action Bush has taken, and why he had taken it, but in the end, they conclude that Bush has got it wrong: "Removing tyrants,
while perhaps helpful, is not a guarantee that terrorists will be significantly weakened." To the contrary, as we now see in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we may be creating endless new generations of terrorists, potential and actual. "


:kick:
dp

[realFedUp]

2. Good link within the article also...

http://www.wws.princeton.edu/bushconf/schedule.htm

on how Bush is doing...

[kimchi]

3. Worth the read, for sure. n/t