They opened a George W. Bush Library this week, prompting many to employ a joke I remember out of David Frye's act. When he did it, he was George Wallace saying of his own library, "They're putting both of my books in there, including the one I haven't even gotten around to coloring!" I sure hope one of the books in the Bush Library is The Pet Goat. It would be nice if they all were.
Bush's approval rating seems to be on a bit of an upswing and all sorts of reasons are being offered. The public likes that in retirement, he hasn't done anything bad, which he's largely accomplished by not doing anything. He seems moderate compared to the current G.O.P. And we just don't like staying mad at people, which is why all former presidents gain points with us after they're just human beings again. I would imagine there's some truth in all of those reasons. I would imagine further that if you asked people if they wished he and his policies were still in office, you'd see a different reaction. (Actually, more of his policies are still in office than some of us had hoped…)
But then we have this whole discussion going on today on the 'net about whether Bush was (and presumably still is) stupid. Keith Hennessey, a former Bush aide, says the man he worked for was a lot smarter than people think. Jonathan Chait says he wasn't. To me, both articles miss the point. My question is not how smart the guy was but what did he do with whatever smarts he had?
Smart people in power can do disastrous things, either because they weren't as smart as they thought or because they had a bad (for most of us) goal. Bush presided over a massive transfer of wealth in this country from the poor to the already-rich. That may have been stupidity or it may have been exactly what he intended…and it doesn't really matter which. The money follows the same pathway. He also presided over the Iraq War which took way more lives and money than anyone intended, all in search of stated goals that were never realized. Bush still says it all went almost according to plan. Is that stupidity or did he really get what he wanted out of it? Again, it doesn't matter which it is. The Americans who died in that war are still dead, either way.
We judge our elected officials not by whether they could pass an I.Q. test but on the results they get, given the reality of the world in which they govern. Obviously, I think Bush failed that test big time. My suspicion is that he was and is a smarter man than many critics and comedians give him credit for…but the test of his presidency is what he did, not whether he was sharp enough to figure out how to do it.