Dan

Calabrese

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June 4, 2009

What? The Public Backs the Bush Agenda? Someone Tell the GOP!

A funny thing happens when someone who knows what he’s doing defends a crucial component of the Bush-Cheney record. The public is convinced.

A new poll out Tuesday from USA Today and Gallup indicates that 54 percent of the American public now opposes the closing of the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. Only about half that many favor closing it.

Let’s sum this up: Dick Cheney kicked President Obama’s butt up one side of the street and down the other during their recent exchange on Gitmo, torture and overall counterterrorism strategy. It was a beatdown of epic proportions, as you might have expected when Obama decided to pick a fight with Cheney on this particular subject.

Cheney won the debate because he knew his stuff, because he spoke with conviction and because he has the personal background to actually understand what he was saying. But more importantly, Cheney won the debate because he was defending a solid record.

But wait. That’s the record of George W. Bush! How can this be? Why, his approval ratings were so low, if they were temperatures, we’d all be shivering like we were at the North Pole! (At least before Bush ruined the North Pole by making all that ice melt or something.)

The roots of Bush’s unpopularity are far too complicated to analyze thoroughly in this space. Start with an unrelenting media assault, throw in the apparent failures of Hurricane Katrina (even though no one really knows how to objectively assess what was done or should have been done), mix in the darkest days of the Iraq War, consider media lies about the Bush-era economy (which continued even after he left office) and sprinkle over the top Bush’s own disinterest in defending himself – and you find your way very efficiently to a 29 percent approval rating.

However he got there, Bush’s ratings had sunk so low by 2006 that conventional wisdom commanded Republicans of all stripes to run from everything he did. One of the first such incidents involved the bipartisan freakout over Bush’s plan to contract with Dubai Ports World to handle port security. The criticism of the move was pure demagoguery, yet Republicans joined in every bit as fervently as Democrats – because they saw no political benefit in defending Bush. And so it continued throughout the rest of his presidency.

There were two huge problems with the run-from-Bush strategy – one substantive, one political. The substantive problem was that Bush’s record was a lot more good than bad. The political problem was that the GOP had to stand for something, and if it wasn’t the Bush record, what would it be? Spending restraint? Oops. Next idea! A muscular foreign policy and a commitment to national defense? No, those were associated with Bush. Tax cuts? No, Bush did that . . .

So the GOP stood for nothing, and parties that stand for nothing don’t win elections, as the 2006 mid-terms demonstrated. By the time we reached the 2008 presidential race, Bush and Cheney were regarded as so toxic that John McCain refused to have either campaign for him. It got so embarrassing that on the rare occasion Bush and/or Cheney would be seen with McCain, poll-obsessed media like Politico would write stories about how badly McCain hoped no one would see the pictures.

That became the storyline. There was simply no winning for McCain or for the Republicans – so convinced were they that the Bush presidency and record were indefensible.

Worse: Because McCain refused to defend any aspect of the Bush record, no matter how laudable, he rendered himself incapable of rebutting the most disingenuous of Obama’s campaign points. I said in October that this was a strategic mistake, and Republican campaign consultants told me I was crazy to suggest McCain could gain anything by associating himself with the Bush-Cheney record.

And if you had told these strategic geniuses back in October that Dick Cheney could publicly take on Barack Obama, and could convince the public by a two-to-one margin that Guantanamo should remain open, what would they have said?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bush certainly had his flaws as a president, but on the whole, his record was solid and is not at all difficult to defend. If Dick Cheney can turn around public opinion on a matter as seemingly toxic to Republicans as Gitmo, just think what the Republicans could have done over the past three years if they had just had the courage to defend the good parts of the Bush record – even as they vowed to do better on the issues where Bush had fallen short.

But the GOP’s vaunted experts said the only reasonable path was to cast aside Bush and Cheney and everything they ever did, because the public would never accept any argument in their defense.

They’re the experts.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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