Ambition and Division: Legacies of the George W. Bush Presidency

4. Bush and Clinton: Contrasting Styles of Popular Leadership

62 n ear the midpoint of George W. Bush’s administration, the editor of this volume collected a series of first appraisals of the president’s political style and governing impact. Steven E. Schier aptly titled his compendium High Risk and Big Ambition. At the time of that volume’s publication in 2004, and for at least a year afterward, much American political and academic commentary viewed Bush through the prism of his outsized ambitions. Bush and his team— most notably Vice President Dick Cheney and chief strategist Karl Rove —signaled early in the administration that they were not motivated primarily by the drive for short-term political success. They were striving for historic change on multiple fronts. Around the world, they sought to impose a new doctrine of “preemption,” including the option of preventive war, against national security threats. In Washington, the administration was determined to assert the supremacy of the executive branch and to reverse what Cheney, in particular, viewed as a dangerous weakening of the powers of the presidency in the decades since Watergate. Bush was similarly expansive in his political ambitions: he wanted to create the conditions that would permit lasting dominance for conservative ideas, bUsh ฀nD cLinton contrasting styles of Popular Leadership john F. Harris 4 63 bush and clinton with the national Republican Party serving as the essential vessel for these ideas. Big ambitions, indeed. What was most striking for a long while was that Bush seemed to be succeeding in his aims. Brushing aside the inconvenient fact that he lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 and required the intervention of the Supreme Court to win office, the new Republican president moved quickly to pass the tax cuts that were the centerpiece of his economic agenda. Empowered by a surge in public support for an aggressive national security policy after 9/11, he launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Certain that he could win any contest in which he could position himself as the candidate of strength and clear thinking, he ran a reelection strategy that ignored Clinton-era assumptions about the primacy of swing voters and the imperative of capturing the center with softedged , nonideological policies. In 2004, many classic indicators, such as presidential approval ratings and the percentage of Americans saying the country was on the “wrong track,” suggested that Bush was headed for defeat. When he prevailed over John F. Kerry on election day, even many Democrats seemed ready to concede that Bush had managed to create a new model for the modern presidency—and that his big ambitions looked quite likely to be fulfilled. Days after Bush’s reelection, tens of thousands of Democrats convened in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the dedication of Bill Clinton’s presidential library. Following tradition, Bush was on hand for the occasion—as was Rove, who moved through the crowd like a conqueror. At the time, many Democrats said what their party needed was their own version of Karl Rove—a political practitioner who could energize liberals as Rove had done with conservatives and use even narrow political margins to power large policy gains. Even Clinton bounded over to Rove, to say, “I want to talk politics with you. You just did an incredible job and I’d like to really get together with you, and I think we could have a great conversation” (from Halperin and Harris 2006, 138). Soon enough, it would become apparent that Bush and Rove had not repealed the laws of political gravity. The second term brought a nearly unrelieved string of policy and political setbacks. A growing majority of Americans believed that the Iraq war, the signature project of Bush’s administration , had been a mistake. What was intended to be his transformational domestic policy achievement, a plan for the partial privatization of Social Security, was a flop that not even Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill wished to be associated with. And, after the 2006 elections, 64 john f. harris there were a lot fewer of those allies: a dozen years of GOP dominance in Congress evaporated in a Democratic rout. Bush’s own approval ratings hovered at Nixonian lows throughout 2007 and 2008, with fewer than 30 percent of Americans backing his presidency, as John White and John Zogby note in their chapter here. Democratic electoral triumphs in 2006 and 2008 marked a final repudiation of Bush’s big plans. Little...