The great New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asks a pertinent question.
“Do we dare to hope that the Bush administration is finally at an end?”
That was the lead in her column published in today’s NY Times. The rest of it is attached:
President Obama had to spend a great deal of his first term trying to explain how – in his mind – the nation plunged so deeply into its fiscal mess. He also had to explain why he believed the Iraq War was wrong.
He did so quite deftly by reliving over and over the presidency of George W. Bush, who recently opened a presidential library and museum at the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas.
But now that he’s been re-elected and is beginning his initial descent toward the end of his presidency, Barack Obama finally can finally stop referencing the Bush presidency when it suits his political needs, said Dowd.
I cannot really blame him for the tactics he used to win re-election. Indeed, the Republicans thought they had Obama right where they wanted him: struggling to right an economy that crashed and burned at the end of the Bush administration and which Obama sought to correct with some hasty stimulus measures that drove the national debt and deficit into the next universe.
You know what? The Obama Economic Plan appears to be working.
Thus, there’s no more reason to blame President Bush for failed policies.
Oh yes, there’s the war thing too. The Iraq War has come to something resembling a conclusion, although bombs are still killing civilians in Iraq. The Afghanistan War is drawing closer to an end, but we’ll still have troops there even after our combat role has been taken over completely by Afghan security forces.
So, let’s answer Dowd’s question. Yes, the Bush administration has ended. Now let’s allow historians to determine its place.