David Frum: The Legacy of the George W. Bush Administration | Big Think

David Frum: The Legacy of the George W. Bush Administration

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The last one concerned with the problems of the 20th century instead of the 21st, positive economic strategies like the rebate and making democracy a core principle again.

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David Frum:

David Frum is the author of five books, including two New York Times bestsellers: THE RIGHT MAN: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (2003), and co-author with Richard Perle of AN END TO EVIL: What's Next in the War on Terror (2004).

Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online. He contributes frequently to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Great Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post. He appears regularly on CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. In 2001-2002, David Frum served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What will the legacy of the Bush Administration be?

David Frum: First, I think the [George W.] Bush administration is going to be the last administration of a set that began with [Richard] Nixon, and continued through the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s. It's going to be the last concerned with the problems of the late 20th century, and I can elaborate.

The first legacy of George [W.] Bush, probably the single most important thing that George Bush did was--there was a mirage at the end of the '90s and the beginning of the 2000s, where we had this huge fiscal surplus left over from the 1990's boom and before the baby boomer retirement began to arrive. So there was this temporary mirage that gave Americans the false impression that they could afford to build an even bigger government than the one they already had.

Now, by 2010 it is going to be obvious that that is not true, because the government is going to get bigger even if you add no single new program, the government is fated to get a lot bigger as the boomers retire and make their demands on Medicare and Social Security. But in 1998 and 1999 and 2000, there looked like there was some possibility. So George [W.] Bush's first and probably most important domestic achievement was, by putting that tax cut in place, by sending the money back out to the country, that forestalled a whole series of ambitious projects that otherwise might well have happened and the country would have discovered were unaffordable.

Now if he had been consistent about that, I think he could have made a great claim to a certain kind of domestic policy success. The problem was, this then goes to a second characteristic of his presidency, because of the extraordinary weakness of his presidential mandate, few presidents have come into office in a weaker way. The president, lacking that popular vote legitimacy, had to go out and re-earn and re-earn and re-earn his majority every day.

Presidents often say things like, "And that's the job the American people elected me to do." George [W.] Bush could never say that. And so he found himself carrying out a lot of ideas that had been tossed out in the 2000 campaign that sounded popular but didn't meet scrutiny, that weren't affordable to the country. The prescription drug program being the classic example. And he went ahead with them anyway because he felt his political situation desperately needed him to.

And so having put a cap on the revenues on the government, having returned all of those surpluses to the country in 2001, which is a good thing to do, he then added levels of domestic fiscal obligation that are completely unmanageable--and that's going to be the negative part of his legacy. I think he will be remembered for presiding over a period of great prosperity, but a prosperity that was not shared as widely as prosperities [sic] of the past have been. Still prosperity is better than nonprosperity [sic]. And if we're heading into an extended period of nonprosperity, then the Bush economy may look a little bit better from the vantage point of 2013, or 2014, than it does from the vantage point of 2008.

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