Bush is pictured during his last news conference in the Brady press briefing room at the White House in Washington January 12, He also addressed the heavy criticism for a slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August But that action would have pulled law enforcement away from helping in the crisis to handle his visit, he said.
He also enjoyed a more dubious distinction - membership of the small group of sitting presidents who have stood for re-election and lost. Every other incumbent president - including Bush's son, George Walker Bush, who served from to - has been endorsed by the public when they have stood on their party's ticket.
It is a quirk of no small significance in a nation where eras are defined in the popular imagination by their presidents - from the thwarted promise of John F Kennedy's early s to the cynicism and paranoia of the Nixon years and the thrusting optimism of Ronald Reagan's s.
For voters and historians alike, the question of whether the head of state serves just four or the maximum eight years has huge symbolic value. Donald Trump will be under pressure to run again and retain power come the election. In a ranking of all 44 presidents by eminent scholars for Siena College Research Institute, there were no single-term presidents in the top The highest-rated incumbent to have been defeated in a re-election campaign was John Adams in 17th place.
Kennedy, in 11th place, was assassinated a year before he could return to the polls and James K Polk, in 12th, did not seek a second term. Since World War Two, eight sitting US presidents have been re-elected to serve a second term, while only three have failed in a general election. The presidency offers an unrivalled platform to attract airtime, raise campaign funds and set the policy agenda.
Sitting presidents, too, tend to escape bruising battles for their party's nomination - although not George HW Bush, who faced a gruelling primary challenge for his place on the Republican ticket from Pat Buchanan. More Resources George H. Bush Presidency Page.
Bush Essays Life in Brief. Life Before the Presidency. Campaigns and Elections. Domestic Affairs. Foreign Affairs. Life After the Presidency.
Family Life. Impact and Legacy Current Essay. In-Depth Exhibits Scroll left to right to view a selection of exhibits. Gorbachev and the USSR.
Proving ground. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Fortunately, al-Qaeda never succeeded in another mass-casualty attack on the United States. That was not because the terrorist organization did not want to do so, but because the Bush administration and later the Obama administration prevented al-Qaeda from doing so. We began the article with the litany of geopolitical deeds above precisely because they are not the actions of a presidency squandering American power through cavalier use of force, rejection of diplomacy, disregard of multilateralism, or abandonment of international leadership.
And yet, they are important parts of the Bush record. As one of us has written , and as we both believe, it is clear in hindsight that the Iraq War was a mistake, wrongly conceived and poorly executed, at exorbitant cost to the United States in blood, treasure, and credibility. We supported the war at the time — as did Zakaria.
If invading Iraq was a mistake that put at risk the American-led international order, then it would have been an even bigger risk to follow the advice of the war critics in and simply walk away, thus ensuring that Iraq would have been a catastrophic strategic defeat. Instead, he did the opposite and, in so doing, turned the situation around. We further agree that President Donald Trump has made many catastrophic choices in word and deed that have exacerbated this decline.
And we concede that Zakaria did not list every negative development one could imagine from the Bush era. Here, of course, it is harder to pin the blame exclusively on Bush himself, since the financial roots of the crisis extended at least a decade or more before Bush took office and reflected many economic trends beyond the realm of policy choices. If the Bush administration fit the caricature Zakaria drew, it would not have managed that crisis nearly as well as it did. Where we part ways with Zakaria is we do not agree that all causation in world affairs ended when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq.
On the contrary, we see a much more nuanced accounting of the pros and cons of the Bush legacy.
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