George W. Bush was a terrible president

Looking back at the last — disastrous — era of efficacious conservative policymaking

If you’re in the DC area, I’m hosting a book talk for Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” I wrote about it last year after I read the manuscript, and it’s the best book on politics I’ve read in several years. We’ll be at Johns Hopkins’ DC building, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, on May 7 from 5:30 to 7:00pm in Room 422. I’ll ask them some questions, we’ll get some questions from the audience, and hopefully everyone will learn something. Official event flier here. Sign up here. I hope to see you there!

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George W. Bush was elected president in the flukey, unfair election of 2000.

Not only did Al Gore (like Hillary Clinton) win the popular vote, but the median voter selected Gore (this was Gary Johnson in 2016), and Gore clearly would have won in a runoff system (this is less clear for Clinton in 2016). And though people remember the infamous litigation around a Florida recount and continue to disagree over who would have won had the Supreme Court let one take place, that leaves out the larger issue of the Palm Beach County ballot design. As Nate Cohn reviewed recently, the evidence is overwhelming that Gore lost a critical margin of votes because people who intended to vote for Gore accidentally checked the box for Pat Buchanan.

Which is just to say that the election was, in every possible way, a moral victory for Gore.

Earlier, Bill Clinton moved to decisively moderate the image of the Democratic Party. He won two elections, and he was popular and effective as president. His chosen successor suffered from a less charismatic personality, from the standard third-term curse that hurts incumbents, and from the fact that the dot-com bubble was unraveling. What’s more, Bush made efforts to moderate the GOP’s image, preaching a gospel of “compassionate conservatism” and ditching the hard-edged anti-immigrant policies of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich.¹

Still, in the face of all those headwinds, Gore was the candidate that the American people preferred, and he should have been president.

Instead, Bush won, and the immediate reaction of many elite commentators was that the accidental and unfair nature of his victory meant he would need to redouble his efforts at moderation and run something resembling a grand coalition or national unity government. This is not what happened. Instead, Bush took the reins of government and acted like every other modern newly elected president, charging ahead with an ideological agenda and rapidly losing standing in the polls. But then came 9/11. His approval rating shot up. The GOP scored an anomalous midterm victory in 2002. A bunch more conservative policy passed after the midterms. And then Bush got re-elected fair and square in 2004, winning the only GOP popular vote victory of the modern era.

The wheels fell off Bushism relatively rapidly after its triumphant reelection, but the period between Bush’s inauguration and the 2006 midterms is a striking and important one.

It’s the only time since Reagan that the conservative movement was truly governing the country. It also falls into a weird kind of gap where the Bush presidency is too recent to be history but too distant to be vividly remembered by many. And I think it’s worth taking a look back and trying to genuinely assess his administration’s major initiatives.

An effective Republican president

When I say the conservative movement was genuinely governing the country, I mean to draw a contrast with the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

He was, obviously, in office. And he enacted some policies. But despite the persistent fears engendered by Trump’s clear aspirations to dictatorial rule, he was in practice a remarkably weak and ineffectual president.