Bush Nostalgia?

Stanley Fish, who blogs on the website of The New York Times, recently revisited a topic about which he had written a year and a half ago: the rehabilitation of George W. Bush's reputation. I had reacted to his earlier post here, and discussed similarities between Bush and one of his predecessors.

I've made no secret of my assessment of Bush's presidency, an evaluation that is, on balance, negative. (See this post and this post.)

I think Fish is overreaching in looking for signs of an early revival for Bush. The Minnesota highway billboard to which Fish refers was financed by some local businessmen, as Scott Johnson explains on Power Line. That says nothing about the opinions of any statistically significant part of the population.

But I do believe that, in the long run, Bush will be viewed much more favorably than he is now. Two reasons: 1) other people's criticisms of Bush have not been as measured as mine, and the passage of time will inevitably convince most people that the strongest of those criticisms were exaggerated; and 2) that is what has generally happened with other former presidents.

The case of Harry Truman has been much talked about, including by me, here and here. As to his successors:

Dwight Eisenhower was still popular when he left office in 1961. The first president to be constitutionally term-limited, he could otherwise probably have won a third term. Current opinions of him are generally favorable. Sophisticates among the comedians and other political commentators in the '50s portrayed Ike as genial but not too bright. I think that that view has faded away to a large extent.

Americans generally considered John Kennedy to be a demi-god, for a period of time after his 1963 assassination. An air of martyrdom and fresh memories of his charisma combined to raise his stature to a level far higher than the meager accomplishments of his 34-month presidency would justify. Today, people across the political spectrum generally have a higher opinion of him than I do. But it was inevitable that those opinions would fall back a little closer to earth over time. Allegations regarding adultery and drug abuse have contributed to that trend. Overall, opinion about Kennedy seems to have returned to where it was when he embarked on his ill-fated trip to Texas. His poll numbers had fallen back to a level just a bit above 50%, as he was seen as above-average but not great.

Lyndon Johnson left office under circumstances similar to those of Truman and George W. Bush. He was unpopular, largely because he got the country bogged down in an unpopular war. I've often thought that, if Johnson had done what he did in 1964, and then declined to run for a full term and retired to Texas, I would have a higher opinion of him that I in fact do. During his first year in the White House, Johnson pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a supply-side tax cut. (The flaw in that analysis is that, had he been a lame duck, LBJ probably would have been less successful with Congress.) There was no good answer as to what to do in Vietnam during Johnson's presidency. But both Hawks and Doves have a case to criticize Johnson for maximizing our involvement in the war, in a way that minimized the chances of accomplishing anything. Emotions about Vietnam have cooled since 1975; as I see it, current opinion about Johnson is somewhat negative, but his critics are nowhere near as hysterical as they were in the late 1960s.

Richard Nixon was always, at best, more respected than loved. He was introverted and uncharismatic. Charismatic presidents such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were able to withstand scandals. But Nixon did not have a reservoir of good will to draw on, when the details of Watergate began to emerge into public view. When he resigned in 1974, Nixon's poll numbers were similar to the low ebbs of Truman and Johnson. After lying low for several years, Nixon began to re-emerge as an author and elder statesman during the 1980s. Toward the end of his life (Nixon died in 1994), I was astounded to hear some people say they wanted him back in the White House. I'm not sure how serious that talk was, but it was based on a misunderstanding of the term-limit amendment; Nixon could not have been elected a third time, despite his having ended his second term prematurely. The effects of charisma, or the lack thereof, seem to fade over time. By now, the foreign-policy-genius-Nixon has grown in relation to the unlovable-Nixon.

Gerald Ford was also charisma-challenged. Unlike his predecessor, Ford was a likable guy. But, perhaps if, in his football days, Ford had been a dashing quarterback, rather than a stolid offensive lineman, he would have had more of a hold on the public's imagination. Ford barely lost his bid for a full term in the White House in 1976. Had it not been for the support he lost when he pardoned Nixon in 1974, chances are Ford would have won that election. After a long ex-presidency, Ford was generally admired. By the time of his death in 2006, people had come to see the pardon as a sacrifice for the sake of the national interest. Further proof that ex-presidents are eventually looked at differently than when they were in office.

Time to end this. It's getting long, and historical perspective is less available in relation to more recent presidents. My point in all this rambling is that historical precedents bode well for an eventual improvement in Bush's reputation. But let's not be premature; one billboard does not a comeback make.

20 Years Ago 17: Soft Power

I decided to write a bit more about Poland's Solidarity movement, after I saw this recent obituary in The New York Times. The article describes the contribution of the late James F. Brown to Solidarity's eventual success.

Brown was director of Radio Free Europe during the pivotal years between 1978 and 1984. His radio station provided important information to the Polish dissidents, without being too strongly polemical about their efforts.

It fits the Times' biases to oppose what they would consider to be too strong an anti-Communist message. But in this case, I think they have a legitimate point about the events that led to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Hungary in 1956.

The American foreign policy establishment early in the Eisenhower presidency, led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, spoke of rolling back Communism (in contrast to the Truman Administration's policy of containment, as articulated by George Kennan). This brief biography of Dulles mentions a degree of caution on Eisenhower's part:

Although both called publicly for the “roll back” of Communism, and the “liberation” of those held captive by its “despotism and godless terrorism,” Eisenhower cautioned his secretary of state to add the phrase “by all peaceful means.”

Still, the argument is made that American rhetoric emboldened Hungarian reformers to resist the party line from Moscow, while the U.S. had no intention (and/or ability?) to back up its words with military force. That allowed the Soviets to militarily crush the Hungarian rebellion. (Similar circumstances obtained in relation to opponents of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship at the end of Gulf War One in 1991.)

25 years after the Hungarian situation, when the world contemplated what the Soviet Union might do in response to the formation of an independent labor union in Poland, the question again arose as to whether the U.S. and others in NATO might react militarily if the Soviets invaded Poland. Ronald Reagan kept Moscow guessing as to his intentions and, while the Polish government imposed martial law and outlawed the Solidarity union, the Soviets stopped short of repeating the tactics they had used in Hungary in 1956 and, under similar circumstances, in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The obituary indicates that Brown "resigned from the network in 1984 because he felt that the Reagan administration’s insistence on avid anti-Communist programming was counterproductive."

As I see it, the results indicate that Reagan struck the correct balance, by speaking out against what he considered wrong in the world, without creating exaggerated expectations about what the U.S. was, and was not, prepared to do.

And all of this provides interesting background to the "hard power" vs. "soft power" debate that has been going on, regarding our war against Al Qaeda.

Reagan's strategy of intentional ambiguity about his future plans was carried on throughout his presidency, not just in regard to Poland's situation. It stands in contrast to President Obama's setting a specific date for American withdrawal from Afghanistan. I understand Obama's strategy of putting pressure on the Afghan government, and I hope he succeeds. Again, this is one of those unanswerable historical what-ifs, but I strongly doubt that, if Reagan had faced the circumstances that Obama faces in Afghanistan, Reagan would have been as clear about his future intentions as Obama has been.

Army Navy

Later today, the Army-Navy football game will be played at its traditional neutral site, here in Philadelphia, about half-way between West Point and Annapolis. To commemorate that event, let's look at alumni of those academies who have become president of the United States.

West Point is ahead of the Naval Academy on that score, by 2-1. Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower were alums of the U.S. Military Academy. But Jimmy Carter is the only Navy alum to become president.

But the football score is expected to go in the other direction. Navy, coming in with a record of 8-4 is favored over 5-6 Army. If Ike were still around to play linebacker for West Point, maybe it would be the other way around. But maybe not, because he'd be 109 years old!

UPDATE: Navy did indeed defeat Army, by a score of 17 to 3.

CORRECTION: I got the math wrong. Eisenhower would be 119 years old.

Statuary Hall

In 1807, the U.S. House of Representatives began meeting in a new chamber in the Capitol building. The meeting room was destroyed in 1814, in the British burning of Washington, during the War of 1812. Restoration of the House chamber was completed in 1819.

There were two main reasons why it was replaced by a new House chamber, in 1857. For one thing, as the country grew, the number of representatives increased, going from 141 in 1807 to 234 in 1857. They needed more space. Also, the acoustics in the old meeting hall were horrible. House members found it difficult to hear their colleagues during congressional debates. (Of course, some of them might have thought that was just fine, but the situation was untenable.)

The old House chamber then became National Statuary Hall. Each state was invited to submit two statues of prominent citizens. The room is still used for that purpose, but it eventually became overcrowded, and some of the statues were moved elsewhere in the Capitol.

California was originally represented by statues of Father Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary, and Thomas Starr King, a 19th-century Unitarian minister. But, this week, King got demoted to the state capitol in Sacramento.

His replacement was Ronald Reagan. In 2000, Congress authorized states to make such substitutions. The only other replacement was done by Kansas, which honored another former president, Dwight Eisenhower, in place of one of its 19th-century governors, George Washington Glick.

Here is an account of the installation of the Reagan statue in the New York Times blog, The Caucus. As one might expect, the most prominent roles in the ceremony were played by Republicans, but the Democratic leaders of both houses also took part.

Image: Architect of the Capitol

Supreme Court 4: Partisan or Not

In Chief Justice John Marshall's groundbreaking opinion in the case of Marbury v. Madison, he ruled against his own Federalist Party. The immediate result of that opinion was that Marshall's fellow Federalist, William Marbury, would not be able to take office as a federal justice of the peace.

However, his party may have lost the battle, but won the war. By asserting the power of judicial review, the Federalist Marshall guaranteed that he would have significant influence over the Republican-controlled executive and legislative branches of the federal government, even after the 1800 election, in which his party had suffered a repudiation from which it would never recover.

The judicial branch has often sidestepped issues that it has deemed to involve political questions. In his Marbury opinion, Marshall stated that "questions, in their nature political ... can never be made in this court." But cases, including that one, have political implications. And the political-question doctrine has been weakened in recent times, e.g., by the legislative reapportionment cases in the 1960s.

Two cases come to mind, in which justices have ruled against the interests of the political party of the president who appointed them.

The first is the Supreme Court's 1974 decision in the case of U.S. v. Nixon. The court unanimously required the Republican President Richard Nixon to reveal tape recordings of conversations related to the Watergate scandal. That decision was the straw that broke the camel's back, forcing Nixon to resign shortly thereafter. Two justices who had been appointed by the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, plus three justices appointed by Nixon himself, ruled against the president. A fourth Nixon appointee, William Rehnquist, then an associate justice, took no part in the decision, because he had worked in Nixon's administration.

That's an extreme example, being a unanimous opinion. Even Republicans in Congress had begun to turn against Nixon, so it's no surprise that Republican-appointed justices joined in the unanimous opinion.

A more interesting example is one of the most controversial 5-4 decisions in Supreme Court history. I refer to the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore. The decision halted recounts of the Florida presidential vote, thus ending Democrat Al Gore's hopes of erasing Republican George W. Bush's slim lead for the decisive Florida electoral votes. Two of the four dissenting justices (i.e., those favoring Gore's position) had been appointed by Republican presidents. John Paul Stevens was chosen by Gerald Ford. And David Souter had been nominated by candidate Bush's own father, George H.W. Bush. There was some talk at the time of Souter betraying the Bush family, but that point of view runs counter to the independence that the Constitution provides to the judiciary.

Aside from these questions that have direct partisan political implications, presidents are frequently disappointed in the positions that their appointees take, once they're on the Supreme Court.

Souter, who is in the process of retiring, has caused bigger headaches for Republicans than just his dissent in Bush v. Gore.

I've written, in a series of posts that began here, about how slippery the words "liberal" and "conservative" are, when applied to the political branches of government. My opinion is that it's even more difficult to apply those labels to judges but, of course, people do.

Souter is generally considered to be part of the liberal faction on the court, as is Stevens. What angers many Republicans most, is Souter's role in upholding the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.

One of George H.W. Bush's Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower, also regretted at least one of his Supreme Court appointments. There was a vacancy in the position of chief justice, early in Eisenhower's first term. Eisenhower made what must at the time have seemed a safe choice, appointing the Republican governor of California, Earl Warren.

According to some reports, Eisenhower later called that nomination "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made". That view seems, at least in part, to have arisen from the Warren Court's 1954 Brown decision on school integration. However, Warren's record on such issues as criminal procedure, school prayer, legislative redistricting, interracial marriage, etc., may have contributed to Eisenhower's view.

By the time of the Brown case's 50th anniversary in 2004, politicians of both parties were ready to heap praise on Warren and his colleagues. But Eisenhower's negative view of that decision reflects how controversial the court's decision was in the 1950s and beyond.

Another Eisenhower appointee, Associate Justice William Brennan, was long considered a bulwark of the Supreme Court's "liberal wing", and that was probably another nomination Ike would not make, if he had it to do over again.

Eggheads

Some days back, President-elect Obama chose Steven Chu, a physics professor at University of California, Berkeley, as his secretary of energy. Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997.

Some American presidents and secretaries of state (and one almost-but-not-quite president) have won the Nobel Peace Prize. But, unless I miss my guess, Chu must be the first Cabinet nominee to have won a Nobel science prize.

Republican administrations have certainly had some personnel with academic backgrounds, such as Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein. But the Democrats have been the party that has been more closely identified with academic intellectuals.

President Kennedy famously said to assembled Nobel laureates at a 1962 White House dinner: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Since his death, the notion of Kennedy himself being intellectual has been largely debunked. (Not that being intellectual is necessarily a good quality in someone with a job like that.) All of the appreciation of high culture in the family was on the part of the First Lady. The president made a reasonably good show of appreciating it, both to burnish his public image, and to placate his long-suffering wife.

And many believe that the book for which Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize, Profiles in Courage, was ghost-written by Ted Sorensen.

But the point is that Kennedy, like many modern Democrats, played to an intellectual constituency.

That seems to be just fine with some Republicans. They sometimes delight in referring to intellectual Democrats as "eggheads". There are indications that that term predates Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois governor, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. But if you look at a picture of Stevenson, the name seems to fit. And the word was popularized through its use against Stevenson by Republicans, during those campaigns.

George Will, in this column from 2000, challenged Stevenson's intellectual credentials. But I suppose the Eisenhower campaign was fine with their opponent's intellectual image. They probably wanted to portray Ike as the friendly man of action, in contrast to the brooding egghead, paralyzed by his thoughts. On the other hand, some Democrats considered Eisenhower a smiling airhead, who replaced the Cabinet of new dealers with one filled with car dealers.

These days, when the culture wars, which were arguably in their infancy during the Eisenhower years, are in full bloom, those competing images still come into play in presidential campaigns. McCain and Palin were accused of running an anti-intellectual campaign. Also, before McCain was nominated, three Republican presidential candidates expressed disbelief in the theory of evolution, during a debate.


No one seems to want to come right out and say it, but I think one driver of the Obamacon phenomenon, i.e., those of us toward the right-hand side of the political spectrum who supported Obama in the recent election, is in part a rejection of this anti-intellectual trend. Was that a good enough reason? Maybe, maybe not. But what's done is the done, and now we'll see the results.

I Need Him

President-elect Obama has reportedly offered to U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, the job of White House chief of staff. It's not yet official, but it would be odd for a president-elect to allow a story to go this far, without being confident of acceptance.

Emanuel needs to consider whether to sacrifice a promising congressional career, in order to go back into the White House whirlwind.

He became chair of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest position in his party's House leadership, in his third term. That could put him on the road toward eventually becoming speaker. House Democrats, more so than the Republicans, tend to follow an orderly system of promotion within their leadership ranks.

That seems odd in a party about which humorist Will Rogers said "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." But it has been the case.

Perhaps Emanuel, who was a key aide in the Clinton White House, wants to return to the center of action.

The title of this post is arguably the most famous quotation about a White House chief of staff. Dwight Eisenhower said it of Sherman Adams. Eisenhower was later required to get along without Adams, who resigned after being caught up in a bribery scandal.

Eisenhower's successors, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, did away with the position. But Richard Nixon brought it back, placing the infamous H.R. (Bob) Haldeman in that spot. All of Nixon's successors have appointed chiefs of staff.

Change. Now, where was it that I heard that?

In discussing presidential transitions, I noted how rarely one president is elected to succeed a president of the same party. It happened only three times during the 20th century: 1908, when William H. Taft succeeded Theodore Roosevelt; 1928, when Herbert Hoover succeeded Calvin Coolidge; and 1988, when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan.

In each of those cases, a popular president did not seek reelection, and was succeeded by someone who had served in his administration as either vice president or secretary of a department.

It's also true of each of those instances that, four years hence, the successor failed to win a second full term. I think we can chalk that up to coincidence. If anyone thinks they see cause-and-effect there, please comment to that effect.

The obvious current question is: what does all this mean for John McCain? As I noted earlier, the retiring president is nowhere near as popular as the three named above. And McCain has not been part of George W. Bush's administration.

The main element that makes it difficult to do what McCain wants to do, is that a candidate in his position can be tarred by all of the negatives of the outgoing administration, without enjoying the advantages of incumbency. Swooping into town on Air Force One, and perhaps sprinkling a little federal grant money around, livens up a campaign trip of an incumbent president. By contrast, a senator on a leased campaign plane will probably be asked to justify the Iraq war, and might not look quite as presidential as he wants to look, in the process.

Perhaps the most heartening thought for McCain might be to consider three presidential candidates who came up just short, in their attempts to succeed a president of their party: Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Al Gore in 2000. In the first two cases, the popular vote was very close and, of course, in the third Gore actually won a plurality of the popular vote. But in each of those cases, the opposition-party challenger put together a sufficient electoral college majority.

In each of those years, the incumbent president had issues. Dwight Eisenhower was personally popular, but the country was in recession in 1960. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson's policies were under attack from both left and right. In 2000, Bill Clinton remained popular, but Gore distanced himself from Clinton in order to avoid association with the scandal that had brought impeachment in 1998.

Still, with a few more votes in Florida, Illinois, and maybe a couple of other states ...

But, whether an incumbent is on the ballot or not, the electorate has often wanted -- guess what? Change! We will soon find out whether Barack Obama's emphasis of that theme gets him the result he wants.