From Ron Brownstein's excellent essay at The Atlantic:Literally from the first moments of his presidency, Obama has repudiated [former president] Bush in unusually pointed terms. The process started in Obama's inaugural address, when he declared, in an unmistakable reference to Bush's security policies, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." Obama was equally unsparing about Bush's economic policies in his address to Congress last week: "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."Brownstein showcases the President's extraordinary opportunity to politically realign the country against a 1997 book called The Politics Presidents Make. In that book, the author notes that some of the most successful presidents in our history took over from widely repudiated failures: Jackson from Adams, Lincoln from Buchanan, FDR from Hoover, Reagan from Carter.
...[The President's proposed budget] denounces Bush as overly secretive ("It is no coincidence that the policy failures of the past eight years have been accompanied by unprecedented Governmental secrecy"), incompetent, fiscally irresponsible, short-sighted, ideologically rigid (pursuing "a dogmatic deregulatory approach") and favoring the rich over all others. The White House sums up the previous occupant's record this way: "This is the legacy that we inherit - a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities, of missed opportunities and of deep, structural problems ignored for too long."
George W. Bush, by many estimations, was the worst president in our history. Did the election of Barack Obama present a new opportunity to swing the political pendulum back to the left for an extended period? Only time will tell.
In the mean time, Brownstein's entire piece is definitely worth a read.
