Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy: The Right Man?

231 Pages·2010·1.393 MB·English

by  Iwan Morgan, Philip John Davies (eds.)

The Evolving American Presidency Series
Series Foreword
The American Presidency touches virtually every aspect of American and world poli-
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Michael A. Genovese
Loyola Chair of Leadership
Loyola Marymount University
Palgrave’s The Evolving American Presidency, Series Editor
The Second Term of George W. Bush
edited by Robert Maranto, Douglas M. Brattebo, and Tom Lansford
The Presidency and the Challenge of Democracy
edited by Michael A. Genovese and Lori Cox Han
Religion and the American Presidency
edited by Mark J. Rozell and Gleaves Whitney
Religion and the Bush Presidency
edited by Mark J. Rozell and Gleaves Whitney
Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W. Bush
by Robert Swansbrough
American Royalty: The Bush and Clinton Families and the Danger to the American
Presidency
by Matthew T. Corrigan
Accidental Presidents: Death, Assassination, Resignation, and Democratic
Succession
by Philip Abbott
Presidential Power in Action: Implementing Supreme Court Detainee Decisions
by Darren A. Wheeler
President George W. Bush’s Influence over Bureaucracy and Policy: Extraordinary
Times, Extraordinary Powers
edited by Colin Provost and Paul Teske
Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy: The Right Man?
edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies
Assessing George W. Bush’s
Legacy
The Right Man?
Edited by
Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies
ASSESSING GEORGE W. BUSH’S LEGACY
Copyright © Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10858-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-29134-2 ISBN 978-0-230-11433-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230114333
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Assessing George W. Bush's legacy : the right man? / edited by Iwan
Morgan & Philip John Davies.
p. cm.—(Evolving American presidency series)
1. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– 2. Bush, George, W.
(George Walker), 1946– —Social and political views. 3. United States—
Politics and government—2001–2009. 4. United States—Foreign
relations—2001–2009. I. Morgan, Iwan W. II. Davies, Philip, 1948–
E902.A868 2010
973.931092—dc22 2010013862
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014
Contents
List of Figure and Tables vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction: Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy:
The Right Man? 1
Iwan Morgan
One Rating Bush 11
Andrew Rudalevige
Two Bush’s Style of Presidential Leadership 31
Nigel Bowles
Three Bush’s Congressional Legacy and Congress’s
Bush Legacy 51
John E. Owens
Four Bush, the Judiciary, and the Conservative
Constitutional Counterrevolution: Close
but No Cigar 79
Robert J. McKeever
Five The Ethical Record of the Bush Presidency 99
Clodagh Harrington
Six Did Bush Pursue a Neoconservative Foreign Policy? 121
Timothy J. Lynch
Seven Bush’s Foreign Policy Legacy: Counting the Cost 145
John Dumbrell
Eight Bush and Big Government Conservatism 165
Alex Waddan
Nine Bush’s Political Economy: Deficits, Debt,
and Depression 185
Iwan Morgan
Ten Bush’s Partisan Legacy and the 2008 Elections 207
Philip John Davies
Index 223
Figure and Tables
Figure
3.1 The Changing Ideological Position of the Congressional
Parties: 91st Congress and 110th Congress 55
Tables
1.1 Selected Rankings in Presidential Surveys, 1962–2008 19
3.1 Tight Inter-Party Competition and Control of the
Congress and the Presidency, 2001–8 57
6.1 PNAC Signatories Hired and Not Hired by the
George W. Bush Administration 131
Contributors
Nigel Bowles is Honour Balfour Fellow in Politics at St. Anne’s College
and Director of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University.
His numerous publications include The White House and Capitol
Hill and Nixon’s Business: Power and Authority in the Modern
Presidency, winner of the American Politics Group’s Richard E.
Neustadt Prize in 2006. He is also the author of a widely read text,
Government and Politics of the United States.
Philip John Davies is director of the Eccles Centre for American
Studies at the British Library. His many publications include Elections
USA; US Elections Today; Winning Elections and Political Marketing
(coedited with Bruce Newman); The Federal Nation: Perspectives on
American Federalism; America’s Americans: Demographic Issues in
American Society and Politic; and Right On? Political Change and
Continuity in George W. Bush’s America (all coedited with Iwan
Morgan). He is chair of the American Politics Group.
John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at Durham University. His
numerous books include President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet
Communism; A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations
from the Cold War to Iraq; and The Carter Presidency: A
Re-evaluation. His most recent study is Clinton’s Foreign Policy:
Between the Bushes 1992–2000.
Clodagh Harrington is Lecturer in Politics at de Montfort University.
She achieved her Ph.D. on the role of the Special Prosecutor in
American politics from Watergate to the Monica Lewinsky scandal in
2006 and is currently engaged in turning that into a book.
Timothy J. Lynch is Senior Lecturer in U.S. Foreign Policy at the
Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. He is
the author of Turf Wars: The Clinton Administration and Northern
Ireland and (with Robert Singh) After Bush: The Case for Continuity
in American Foreign Policy, which won the American Politics Group’s
Richard E. Neustadt Prize in 2009; and numerous scholarly articles.
Robert J. McKeever is Head of Department of Law, Governance and
International Relations at London Metropolitan University. He has
x Contributors
published extensively on U.S. constitutional issues in scholarly jour-
nals and in various edited collections. His books include Raw Judicial
Power? The Supreme Court and American Society.
Iwan Morgan is Professor of U.S. Studies and Director of the U.S.
Presidency Centre at the Institute for the Study of the Americas,
University of London. His publications include: Eisenhower versus
“the Spenders”; Deficit Government; Nixon; and, most recently, The
Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy
Carter to George W. Bush, winner of the American Politics Group’s
Richard E. Neustadt Prize in 2010. He is chair of the executive com-
mittee of the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States.
John E. Owens is Professor of U.S. Government and Politics at the
University of Westminster and Faculty Fellow in the Center for
Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. His
publications include: Congress and the Presidency; Leadership in
Context; and The Republican Takeover of Congress. His most recent
work is America’s “War” on Terrorism: New Dimensions in United
States Government and National Security (coedited with John
Dumbrell).
Andrew Rudalevige is Associate Professor of Political Science at
Dickinson College. One of the foremost scholars of the presidency, his
publications include Managing the President’s Program: Presidential
Leadership and Legislative Policy Formation, winner of the American
Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award for the
best book written on the presidency in 2002; The New Imperial
Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate; and (as
coeditor) The George W. Bush Legacy.
Alex Waddan is Senior Lecturer in U.S. Politics at the University of
Leicester. A specialist in U.S. public policy, especially pertaining to
social welfare and economic issues, he has written two books, The
Politics of Social Welfare and Clinton’s Legacy: A New Democrat in
Governance, and published numerous articles in scholarly journals,
such as Political Science Quarterly.
Introduction
Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy:
The Right Man?
Iwan Morgan
George W. Bush claimed not to care what scholars would have to say
about his presidency just after his departure from office. In 2002, his
chief political adviser, Karl Rove, declared, “President Bush is fond
of saying that, in the short run, history always gets it wrong.” In his
last press conference, with his presidency widely deemed to have been
a failure, a defiant Bush remarked that it was too soon to reach this
verdict or any other. “There is,” he insisted, “no such thing as short-
term history. I don’t think you can possibly get the full breadth of an
administration until time has passed.”1 Without doubt, the impact
and significance of a president’s legacy can be properly understood
only in relation to the course of history in the years after he leaves
office. Nevertheless, whatever the forty-third president’s misgivings
on this score, an immediate estimate of his place in history is also
legitimate. The recent past is too important a subject to leave to the
analysts of the future. Whatever one’s views on Bush’s presidency, it
has immense significance for America’s twenty-first century devel-
opment. Its legacy, therefore, merits immediate assessment, even if a
definitive judgment requires the passage of time.
This analysis of Bush’s legacy consists of essays written by nine UK
scholars of U.S. politics and one American. Hopefully it can offer an
outsider perspective that brings different insights and perhaps a more
disinterested perspective in comparison to a volume on the same sub-
ject written by U.S. scholars. The project grew out of a conference,
coorganized by the British Library’s Eccles Centre [EC] for American
Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas [ISA] of the
University of London’s School of Advanced Study in March 2009.
The editors express their thanks to their colleagues in both institu-
tions, particularly Kate Bateman and Jean Petrovic of the EC and
Olga Jimenez and Karen Perkins of the ISA, for their hard work and
support in making this event a success.