GHW Bush had a similar problem that Nixon had in 1960, he was grey while his opponent wasn’t. To make matters worse he had Pirot taking away a chunk of votes that would have been Bush’s if Pirot hadn’t run his ‘I’m a sore loser’ campaign.
Looking back over the last half dozen holders of the oval office I find that the three that I thought were the worst at the time, GHW Bush, Ford, and Carter come off the best. This is a poor statement about the people we have elected to the office of president of the country.
None of them were great, but none of them left rifts in the country, none of them left us with insolvable problems. Then the worst none of them screwed up either the economy or foreign policy so bad that we are still fighting a war because of their fuckup.
You can blame GHW Bush for not continuing into Iraq but he had the vision to see the quagmire it was, quite unlike his son. Ford and Carter gave us a bad economy. But let’s face facts, the economy was going bad before either of them were in office. Nobody short of FDR and a compliant Congress could have fixed the late ’70s until the technology bump of the early ’80s happened. That was a bad economy waiting to happen.
You can argue that Clinton reduced the deficit — sorry he left us the legacy of the whole ‘war on terror’ mess. He had multiple warning signs through his whole eight years but was so distracted that he ignored them.
Yes, Obama inherited Clinton and Bush II’s messes but rather than spending his political capital on fixing them he gave us the endlessly argued and divisive healthcare reform. I am not going to give my opinion of the pluses or minuses of the result, what I will say is that by spending his effort on that one piece of legislation and alienating half of the country he lost any chance of solving the War or Economy in a meaningful way. There is no guarantee that he could have done anything about them with the capital he spent on healthcare. But we will never know if Mitch “He’s a one-term President” could have held his party in line for votes to pull out of Iraq or Afganistan in 2008 when it was popular and it looked possible. That would have done more to help the economy and balance the budget than any other action that could have been taken. But no, a stimulus that the Republicans fought even when they admitted off the record it was needed, then health care that the could hang his name on. Arguing in favor of keeping troops fighting an unpopular war would have been a non-starter, but this wasn’t his play. Sorry, Obama goes down my list just for this move.
Bush II, the list is long and horrible, the only reason he wouldn’t be at the bottom of recent presidents in my mind is that I think Trump is worse — sorry to everyone who thinks Trump is good, I disagree.
Saint Ronald, at first glance you would think he would get on the good list. Good economy, setting up the USSR to fall, what’s not to like? Well, anyone that was breathing could have a good economy during the 80s and he almost fucked it up with his tax cuts, then claimed the tax cuts helped the economy. Then there is the deficit, he set us up with the beginnings of the debt we are living with now, and the GOP that somehow thinks that fewer taxes and income is the way to reduce the debt. A hint for the GOP, less never means more, no matter how you look at it. The reason, the only reason that Reagan’s tax cuts even sort of worked was because the economy was already booming when he dropped them into the mix. Then the economy slowed way down — recession of 1984, and he was forced to raise taxes again. Guess what, raise taxes and the recession stopped. Folks get used to it your illusion that low taxes mean a hot economy is exactly damn backward. Look at the history of how the economy has grown? Hell, look at times when the US, Germany or Japan has had high taxes, low government debt plus high government spending and see how the economy is going. It is in the numbers, read it and live with it. This last damn tax cut, it just slammed the breaks on an economy that was just starting to warm up. Thank you, GOP, you as much as guaranteed a recession in the next couple of years.
