America’s Best Modern President: George W. Bush

In times of tough decisions, our 43rd President held the line.

George W. Bush delivers his second inaugural address in 2005. (Credit: Paul Morse)

Only three men have stood at the helm of our republic under attack. The first two, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, join George Washington atop most rankings of American Presidents. The third, George W. Bush, often ranks near the bottom. Only 5% of Bush’s own Republican Party view him as the greatest President of the past forty years, preferring Reagan. Right and left alike pillory Bush’s leadership. Far fewer books and articles discuss W. than his predecessors and successors alike. This is in large part because so few care to defend Bush—certainly not the man himself. Leaving office in 2009 with a record low 34% approval rating, a far cry from 92% days after 9/11, Bush took a final act of grace unprecedented in the modern era and stepped almost completely away from politics after leaving office. 

George W. Bush entered the Oval Office following the closest election in American history. Having lost the popular vote and secured the electoral college by a mere 537 votes in Florida after the intervention of the Supreme Court, Bush began the most domestically oriented presidency since the 1930s. The lion’s share of his inaugural address was dedicated to the “compassionate conservative” platform he ran on, calling for work-based poverty assistance, aid to faith-based community initiatives, and standardized testing across American schooling. The murder of three thousand Americans in the worst attack on our nation since World War II lurched his presidency towards the War on Terror, eventually leading to dozens of international entanglements, most famously the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The war in Afghanistan, directly targeting the perpetrators of 9/11, received near unanimous support. The more controversial invasion of Iraq collapsed the nation into civil war as American-led coalition forces failed to find the very weapons of mass destruction that formed the conflict’s casus belli.

The Iraq War was undeniably mishandled. However, fears that an avowedly anti-American dictatorship may be building nuclear weapons were not unfounded. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein repeatedly refused to permit inspectors to enter his nation or completely deny such a program. Operating on the best information available, the United States and her allies erred on the side of caution and made the difficult decision to invade. Further, the Iraq of today is nonetheless more free and more prosperous than Saddam Hussein’s bloodsoaked fiefdom. American forces did succeed, if momentarily, in defeating the Afghan Taliban and countering Al-Qaeda terrorism globally. War was not Bush’s only foreign policy tool, his use of targeted aid to counter the AIDS epidemic in Africa, cut by President Obama, saved an estimated seventeen million lives. Meanwhile, Bush cut funding to support autocratic regimes to promote global democratization.

Domestically, the Bush Administration expanded healthcare access, established the Amber Alert, set federal standards for school performance, and moved money to support charitable religious organizations previously held back by concerns over violation of the separation of church and state. Bush harangued America’s “addiction to oil” and gave federal support to market based initiatives for greener alternatives such as nuclear and hydrogen power while maintaining American energy independence. Bush did this while launching the nation’s last major initiative to cut spending on our largest entitlement program. Social Security reform was stifled, but his privatization plan, akin to those successfully implemented in nations such as Sweden, would have averted a projected insolvency by 2035. Bush began to reign in the financial sector after the Clinton Era with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and attempted to pass legislation overseeing federal loans corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These efforts, which may have cushioned the 2008 recession, were stymied primarily by widespread opposition from Clintonian New Democrats.

Leading the nation in a time when conservative media failed to guide the national narrative, Bush’s legacy has been defined by his critics. Future assessments must look past the propaganda and at the record to assess Bush’s decisions–and his enemies–from the perspective of the information available. When doing so, they will see a courageous president that held fast the ship of state for an unprecedented nation in unprecedented times.