Can 44 Subtract 43 From the Equation?
By MAUREEN DOWD
DALLAS — DO we dare to hope that the Bush administration is finally at an end?
After four years of bending the Constitution, the constitutional law
professor now in the White House is trying to unloose the Gordian knot
of W.’s martial and moral overreaches after 9/11.
Safely re-elected, President Obama at long last spoke bluntly about the
Faustian deals struck by his predecessor, some of them cravenly
continued by his own administration.
In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama talked about how
we “compromised our basic values,” and he concluded with a slap at W.:
“Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony
at a battleship or a statue being pulled to the ground.”
On the eve of the president’s speech, I was at the George W. Bush
Presidential Library and Museum here, watching the film of Saddam’s
statue being pulled to the ground.
It’s remarkable that Obama is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush
presidency just as W. is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush
presidency. Browsing the library, you wonder if these two presidents are
complete opposites after all, as you see how history was shaped by an
arrogant, press-averse, father-fixated, history-obsessed, strangely
introverted chief executive.
Robert Draper, the author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W.
Bush,” perused the library with me and observed: “So 43 grew up entitled
but could display a commoner’s touch, while 44 grew up hardscrabble yet
developed this imperial mien. The former is defined by incuriosity, the
latter by self-absorption. One is a late-blooming artist, the other a
precocious writer. They can each make you kind of miss the other.”
Obama’s compelling speech on Thursday was his way of saying he didn’t
want the seductive but morally dicey drone program he inherited from W.
to define his own presidency. The way it had been going, one of the
killer robots, hanging from the ceiling, might have made a fitting
centerpiece for an Obama library.
W.’s library highlights his role in launching the Global War on Terror,
an Orwellian phrase designed to conflate the sins of Osama, who was
responsible for 9/11, and the sins of Saddam, who was not. That was the
fatal mistake and hallmark of the Bush era. W., Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smokescreen and
treated pre-emptive attacks as just.
Better late than never, Obama brought his lapidary logic and legal
cautions to bear. “Neither I nor any president can promise the total
defeat of terror,” he said. “We will never erase the evil that lies in
the hearts of some human beings nor stamp out every danger to our open
society.”
Conservatives can honk, as Senator Saxby Chambliss did, that Obama’s
speech “will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.” But this president
has killed more top Qaeda operatives than Bush did. While W.’s bullhorn
vow after 9/11 to catch the “people who knocked these buildings down”
plays every few minutes at his library, I couldn’t find any photos of
Osama or acknowledgment of Bush’s failure to catch him. Obama’s library
will have a wing for that feat.
You could fill an entire other library with what’s not in W.’s. Cheney and Rummy have been largely disappeared, and it is Condi Rice who narrates the 9/11 video. You won’t see the iconic “Mission Accomplished” photo, or that painful video in which W. keeps reading “The Pet Goat” to children after learning that America is under attack, or the notorious “flyover” photo of a desultory Bush jetting from Crawford to the White House and looking through the window of Air Force One at Katrina’s devastation.
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