by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers
Bush's Divided Legacy
While campaigning for president, George W. Bush often repeated that he would seek to change the negative and partisan tone in Washington, D.C. "I'm a uniter, not a divider," Bush would say. "I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another." Similarly, during his campaign for president, Barack Obama stated his desire to end the bitter partisanship of American politics, often saying he would be president, not of "blue" or "red" America, but the United States of America. Indeed, since Nov. 4, President-elect Obama appears to be living up to that promise by reaching out to conservatives and signaling that he is open to conservative ideas. "The monopoly on good ideas does not belong to a single party," Obama said recently. "If it's a good idea, we will consider it." But Obama will arguably have a tougher time uniting the country, toning down partisanship, and creating a more bipartisan atmosphere than Bush did in January 2001. A recent CNN poll found that a whopping 82 percent of Americans believe that Bush did not unite the country. In fact, Bush himself just recently admitted that he had not lived up to his "uniter, not a divider" rhetoric, saying last month that he "didn't do a very good job of it" (though he later blamed others for "needless name-calling"). But over the last eight years, "pitting one group against another" is exactly the kind of politics Bush played. He and his allies exploited national issues, ruthlessly attacked progressives for political gain, and politicized the federal government to serve the interests of the Republican party.
POLITICIZING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan recently admonished his former boss, saying that the White House took a "permanent campaign approach" to governing. In 2003, Bush's political guru Karl Rove or his top aide, Ken Mehlman, "visited nearly every agency to outline White House campaign priorities, review polling data and, on occasion, call attention to tight House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be affected by regulatory action." Rove also led an unprecedented campaign to politicize the federal government to serve the interests of the Republican Party. Earlier this year, a Department of Justice report found that agency officials "violated both federal law and Department policy" by hiring, firing and promoting of some Department applicants and officials for political reasons. Another DOJ report released in September found that the firing process of nine U.S. attorneys was "fundamentally flawed" and in some cases governed by politics. For example, Bush appointee and former DOJ official Monica Goodling refused to hire an experienced counterterror official because his wife was a Democrat, and she rejected a DOJ attorney's promotion because of an "inappropriate" gay relationship. But Justice was not the only department tainted by politics under Bush. A DOJ inspector general released a report just this week finding that Bradley Schlozman, a former Justice official "entrusted with enforcing civil rights laws," had refused to hire lawyers whom he labeled as "commies" and transferred another attorney for allegedly writing in "ebonics" and benefiting from "an affirmative action thing." The White House also routinely favored politics over science regarding climate change by muzzling NASA's chief global warming scientist James Hansen's climate change findings, censoring scientific evidence on global warming in an EPA report, and editing all government scientists' testimony to fit its political aims. The Office of Faith Based Initiatives, the General Services Administration, the Interior Department, the Defense Department, Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were also not spared of politics during the Bush years.
DIVIDING ON SOCIAL ISSUES: Shortly after taking office, Rove convinced Bush to issue an executive order that effectively ended federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Despite evidence showing the enormous scientific benefits to such research, Rove's move sought to appease the GOP base, rather than promote sound policy. In the run-up to the 2004 election, Rove orchestrated a campaign to significantly boost turnout of the GOP base by placing measures to ban gay marriage on the ballot in numerous battleground states. Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans -- the GOP's largest gay group -- said at the time that Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was part of a calculation by Rove that "4 million evangelicals stayed home in 2000. As a result, the 2004 campaign has focused on energizing the far right while ignoring mainstream Republicans."
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: The Bush White House political approach to foreign policy was perhaps its most divisive. Bush and other administration officials regularly painted Democrats and progressives as "weak" on national security and suggested that electing Democrats would make Americans less safe. During the 2004 campaign, Rove famously said that "conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Bush painted challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), a Vietnam war veteran, "as a man who would undercut American defenses, surrender its military decisions to other nations and treat terrorism as a disease in need of treatment rather than an enemy force in need of evisceration." Vice President Cheney was explicitly saying that if Americans elected Kerry, "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists. During the 2006 mid-term election campaign, Bush tried to bring back the divisive rhetoric. "I want you all to remember when you got to the polls...what political party supported the president to make sure we have the tools necessary to protect the American people, and which political party didn't," he said. Even after the 2006 elections, Bush continued to beat the partisan drum. Last September in his address to the Republican National Convention, Bush attacked Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) critics, invoking McCain's time as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison and comparing his torturers to the "angry left."
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NASA climate scientist James Hansen, a prominent global warming activist, will receive the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Meteorological Society.
THINK PROGRESS: Newsweek's Evan Thomas's story claiming that torture might work contradicts his 2006 article saying that it doesn't.
WONK ROOM: Republican Study Committee proposes ineffective tax cuts, destructive spending reductions for stimulus.
YGLESIAS: MSNBC's "Morning Joe" team is full of status anxiety when talking about bloggers.
U.N. DISPATCH: 145 foreign policy experts outline concrete steps the new administration can take to restore American credibility in the world.
CALIFORNIA: New Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson says she will "immediately revisit the Bush administration's decision to block California and 18 other states from setting tough limits on greenhouse gases."
FLORIDA: "The Florida Legislature approved $1.2-billion worth of spending cuts Wednesday to balance the state's $2.4-billion budget deficit."
ENVIRONMENT: Ignoring environmentalists, the Bush administration will remove gray wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Idaho, and Montana from the endangered species list.
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