Matt Yglesias

The Lame Duck

Funny chyron from MSNBC:

The president-elect working hard while the president is hardly working. Of course, given what we’ve seen from the Bush administration it’s probably just as well that he stick to pardoning turkeys and leave the policy response to Obama’s team. If only he’d thought of this strategy when he first moved in to the White House.

Pity Party

This is a kind of laugh/cry piece:

Others inside and outside the administration, however, say the upbeat talk masks disappointment and frustration among many White House staffers, who believe Bush’s reputation has been unfairly maligned for a series of calamities — from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to the financial crisis — that were beyond his control and that he handled well. GOP nominee John McCain’s escalating attacks on Bush’s tenure have added to the irritation, these people said.

“Everybody kind of wanted to spend the last 100-plus days doing some legacy things, and the financial crisis has thrown a wrench into that,” said one prominent Republican who regularly talks with senior White House officials.

“You have a combination of no legacy stuff, a horrible economic mess and the likelihood that Obama is going to win,” this person added. “There is a real sadness there.”

I feel almost as sorry for Bush as I do for the people who’ve been tortured to death as a result of his policies, or for the over four million Iraqis who’ve been forced to flee their homes. I mean, how could one administration suffer so much bad luck?

The Fates

To be clear, I don’t think that denying that John McCain’s political problems are a result of poor political tactics is equivalent to saying he’s a “victim of circumstances.” He’s a victim of the dual facts that George W. Bush has made the Republican Party extremely unpopular, and of the fact that the national economy has been heading downhill all year.

But neither of those are just vague “circumstances” or bad luck they largely follow from the fact that policies McCain has embraced have had bad consequences. But to me the main difference between 2004 and 2008 isn’t that Bush’s campaign was run by evil geniuses and McCain’s is run by inept fools, the difference is that actual conditions got worse.

Bush’s Place in History Now Secure

George W. Bush is now officially less popular than Harry Truman. For some time now, Bush and associates have taken comfort in the idea that Truman, though much disliked in the early 1950s, is now widely regarded as having been vindicated. Under the circumstances, actually slipping to sub-Truman levels must be seen as truly guaranteeing that he’ll be remembered as a great leader.

Presidents Behaving Badly

Ron Suskind is a great journalist, but this seems like a dubious distinction to me:

George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush’s part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues.

Can we imagine making the reverse claim? Abraham Lincoln was neither an intelligent nor a good man, but in his conduct as president he behaved wisely and morally. That’s not quite right, is it? Lincoln’s wisdom and morality were, rather, revealed by the way he conducted himself as President.

The Record II

Pat Garofalo takes a look at the debt-to-GDP ratio:

As you can see, there are basically two kinds of situations in which this ratio skyrockets — either World War II breaks out, or else you put representatives of the modern conservative movement in the White House.

The Bush/Paulson Record

Brad DeLong posted this chart of the TED spread. I annotated it:

This is why the right response to a Bush/Paulson decision that we have to “do something” would probably be to take their specific proposal, light it on fire, and then call up some people who hadn’t spent the past 12 months ignoring festering problems and ask them to help you write a proposal.

The Record

Ali Frick rounds up the record of Bush administration financial mismanagement in the inimitable Think Progress style. Remember when $5.1 billion in expenses for Iraq reconstruction were charged with no documentation? Or the “widespread” waste and mismanagement on the millions of dollars spent on Katrina recovery? And this is to say nothing of the recent blockbuster scandal at the Interior Department.

For the sake of argument, it does seem to be the case that Hank Paulson and the Treasury Team aren’t as inept as the worst of the worst of the Bush administration. But at the same time, they’re asking for much more money. Figure only half as much theft and squandering as you get from a typical Bush initiative, but then inflate the total amount of money under discussion to $700 million and, well, there’s a problem. The FT’s “Lex” column has observed “Nor is the package necessarily a disaster for the taxpayer or the U.S. dollar. If the Treasury buys assets well, and confidence is restored, there is [a] chance that Mr. Paulson could win fund manager of the year.” Perhaps true, but “if the Treausury buys assets well” is a huge “if” and Paulson is asking for the authority to disburse the money with no oversight.

What’s more, though I suppose it’s indelicate to raise this point, Paulson’s going to be out of a job in a few months and presumably looking for employment in the very same financial industry he’s now in charge of bailing out. The potential conflict of interest is mind-boggling.

Norquist: No Mayor of Baghdad

I was disappointed by a dull talk from Grover Norquist yesterday, but I just unexpectedly saw him again at a New America Foundation event on foreign policy. I’d forgotten how purely cynical he is about these issues. Per Norquist, the big problem with Bush’s foreign policy has been that he often “talks like he wants to be mayor of Baghdad” and thus what John McCain needs to do is basically all the same stuff, but talk about America more. As he sees it, Americans don’t care at all about foreign policy because our country is very big and you can drive hundreds of miles without crossing a border.

Afghanawhere

Tuesday night’s three GOP headliners — Fred Thompson, George W. Bush, and Joe Lieberman — all get through speeches that don’t mention the war in Afghanistan at all.

On The Upswing?

George W. Bush apparently decided to seize on a week of mixed (as opposed to uniformly bad) economic indicators to argue that the economy’s turning around. I could try to offer a rebuttal, I suppose, but I’m always a bit taken aback by how dominated political arguments are by disputes about the present state of the economy. The economy was, uncontroversially, doing pretty well in 1998 but pretty much everything progressives would put on the table today would also have been a good idea ten years ago. There’s never a good time for your country to have an inefficient, unfair health care finance system and there’s never a bad time to find economically viable ways of mitigating future environmental catastrophe. Or for those on the other side of the aisle, if lowering the tax burden paid by rich people will have a beneficial “supply-side” effect that sparks broad-based economic growth, then this is a good thing to do whether the economy’s faring well or poorly.

For the most part, good ideas are good ideas rain or shine. Of course the overall economic situation is shown to have impact on voting behavior, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that the causal mechanism is the objective economic conditions facing undecided voters, not disputes between politicians about how to characterize the situation. After all, in a continent-spanning country of about 300 million people lots of individual families’ economic circumstances will deviate from the mean no matter what.

The Annals of Irony

George W. Bush: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st Century.”

Worst President Ever

Is George W. Bush the worst President ever? New polling looks at the issue: “41% said he would go down in history as the worst, the survey of 1,000 people reported. (The poll did not report on the competition for that title among the president’s predecessors).”

The good news for Bush’s reputation is that fully half the population says he’s not the worst. And I think I’ll have to throw in with the “not worst” camp. Conventional wisdom has traditionally put James Buchanan at the bottom of the rankings, and I think it still holds up — nothing Bush has don’t has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings. Buchanan is tough competition and I don’t think anyone will be beating him for some time.