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By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

6/27/07

George W. Bush!?! The Most Successful American President?!? “How can you, Steve Jonas, give him that appellation,” you might ask? “Awhile back didn’t you say that he was the ‘Worst American President?’ ” And I would say, “indeed I did, but one thing has nothing to do with the other. In fact, I began my TPJ column of Sept. 14, 2006 with the following text (edited slightly here):”

“George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had. Notice that I did not use the word ‘arguably.’ He is simply is. For one reason. He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say ‘elected’), and under which our country has been successfully governed in the 215-plus years since its founding. This is for him the absolutely primary goal. For the nation as a whole his achievement of it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster.

“There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war. Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South’s long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, “How the South Won the (1st US) Civil War,” Sunday, November 06, 2005, at http://www.planetarymovement.org/ [archive] ).

“Some of those bad Presidencies shared major characteristics with that of the Second Bush. Ulysses S. Grant (who was drunk in office), Warren G. Harding, and Ronald Reagan presided over Administrations rife with corruption. James Polk and Lyndon Johnson essentially lied our country into foreign wars aimed at, in the first case, gaining large swatches of the territory of another county, and in the second preventing the establishment, through the Democratic process, of a system of government in another country that ours did not approve of. Herbert Hoover was incompetent when it came to dealing with major economic and natural disasters, and had a strong predilection for favoring the rich. Nixon was paranoid; Clinton was personally irresponsible, and so on and so forth. But none of them set out to destroy US Constitutional Democracy and replace it with a Dictatorship (otherwise known as the ‘Unitary Executive’).”

And so, you might say, “If, Steve, you can say that, how can you label him ‘Most Successful?’ ” And I would respond, “because it all depends upon how you define ‘success.’ If you define it as achieving goals and objectives that are in the best interests of the majority of the American people and indeed of the people of the world at large, and as meeting to the best of his ability the terms of the oath of office he has taken twice — ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ — then clearly George Bush has not only not been the most successful American President. He has clearly been the least successful American President.

However, let us say that you define “success” as achieving what you, yourself, have defined as “successful,” and then set goals and objectives for you to achieve in line with that definition? This is in fact just how I define success when I am writing, as I do in my other profession, the practice of preventive medicine, on how to best undertake health-promoting behavior change: define it in your own terms, not anyone else’s. Well, this is exactly what George W. Bush has done. Except he has done for the country as a whole, not for himself as an individual dealing with, say, an obvious drug-abuse problem. He has ignored the Constitution. In fact, as I never tire of repeating, one of his principal goals is to destroy US Constitutional Democracy. He has ignored his oath of office. His political and policy agendas, both domestic and foreign run totally against the best interests of the majority of the people who elected him. However, if you look at his agenda, and his definition of success, at what he has accomplished since taking office, why I think that it is a “slam dunk” that indeed he is the most successful President this country has ever had. I will spend this column and likely two more discussing that proposition.

But first, let’s just briefly review the many authorities who don’t agree with the proposition that his Presidency has been a success. Time and Newsweek in news articles and columnists’ columns trumpet “the end of the Bush Presidency.” Joe Klein in Time, for example, has been on this theme for quite some time now. “How can he recover?” they say, from, for example, the Iraq debacle or Katrina or Gonzales or (just now) the email thing. The Progress Report of June 14, 2007 tells us of the “Worst Fears Realized” in Iraq, citing a Pentagon (!) Report for the first quarter of 2007 that “confirms what analysts broadly predicted as the onset: the escalation (‘surge’ to the uninitiated) is a failure.”

Assuming that the Georgite reign has been a failure, the title of one Glen Greenwald’s current book tells us that that there is a Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.

Another Progress Report, of June 19, 2007, describes “The Fall of the Bush Empire,” referring specifically to the White House/Republican National Committee email use-and-then-destruction scandal.

For example, the email use/destruction procedures they followed happen to clearly violate Federal law. But then many of the Georgite staff lawyers who would be dealing with this sort of thing, and would or should be vetting the process for its legality or lack thereof, seem to be graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent Law School. So how should it be thought that they know anything about The Law and The Rule of Law? Precisely the opposite, in fact.)

The estimable Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dennis Ross, former senior US diplomats and national security advisors/consultants, have each written books about the disasters of BushCheney foreign policy. They are, respectively, Second Chance: The Crisis of American Superpower and Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World. They present detail after detail of each foreign policy disaster Bush has created. Each author then offers a series of recommendations about how the US as a nation can recover, following the end of the Bush Presidency, and they think that it can. But then there is the new book by the estimable Chalmers Johnson, hardly a radical he. He totally disagrees with Brzezinski and Ross. In Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, he compares what is happening with the Georgites in power to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, at hyper-speed. He thinks that the chances of our survival as a Constitutional Democracy are none too good. And so on and so forth come the condemnations and “F” ratings of and for the Bush Presidency.

By anyone’s definition, a total failure, no? No. Not by anyone’s definition. It is a total failure (or worse) by the definition of the term by those of us who believe in: Constitutional Democracy, the Rule of Law, the provisions of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions (which by the provision of Article VI are part of the law or our land), in the role of government as set forth by the Preamble to the Constitution, in the Social Compact established by the New Deal, in the Separation and Balance of Powers and the Checks-and-Balances provisions made by the Constitution for the effective democratic operation of the Federal government. For us, whether Republican or Democrat (and yes, there are still Republicans who believe in these principles although their number is dwindling), truly conservative (not Conservative) or liberal or progressive, the Bush Presidency is, to repeat, a failure.

But for the Georgites, yes for Bush and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Gonzales and Wolfowitz and the whole Neocon Establishment, the Bush Presidency has been a resounding success and continues to be. That is when we use the second, personal, not Constitutional, definition of success offered above. That is when we measure the outcomes of the politics, policies, and programs of the Bush Administration in terms of what its original goals and agenda were, and are. And this is the key to understanding what is going on here.

If we measure their achievements in conventional terms, failure it is. But when we look at what they really set out to accomplish, boy, they are winners. Not that Bush ever told the American people what his true agenda was, how he was defining success, what his true goals and objectives were. In fact, the Bush did his very best to conceal his true agenda from the American people, and the Congress too, and still very much does. Not that a Democratic candidate for anything (much less the Shrum-driven Kerry of 2004) ever had the temerity to flush out and write large what the true goals of the Georgites were and are. It is not that the true agenda was not there to see, and still is. It is just that most commentators and analysts who have any significant access to the public airwaves and print media really don’t want to talk about it, and the politicians with the will and wherewithal to do so are few and very far between. More on that one down the line.

Next week we will begin to look at the record.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a TPJ contributing author. He is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author of over twenty-five books. Dr. Jonas is one of America’s most perceptive Democratic political analysts.

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