Dan Eggen of the Washington Post got the assignment to do a set-piece pre-post-mortem on the Bush administration. You know the drill. You interview a few Bush staffers (current and retired), you get some quotes on how sad everyone is about how things are turning out. Everyone says that the president is ‘optimistic’ and ‘at peace with his polls numbers’. You throw in a little information about those low poll numbers and how Republican candidates have shunned the president. And then you’re done.
It’s all very predictable. Eggen dutifully did his job. But it is precisely these kind of soft pieces that best exemplify what’s wrong with Beltway reporting. Eggen notes that Bush is ‘arguably the most disliked president since polling on the question began in the 1930s.’ But he does nothing to explain why. It would be helpful if Eggen would explore Bush’s unpopularity with the Left, the Middle, and the Right. Some of the grievances cross ideological boundaries, like the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. But other criticisms are more narrowly held.
On the Left, and not just the fringe-left, Bush and Cheney are seen as more than just bad public servants. They’re seen as outright criminals. As early as January 2006, a Zogby Poll showed that 53% of Americans wanted Congress to initiate impeachment hearings if they found that Bush had authorized warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. It turns out that Bush had, in fact, authorized warrantless wiretapping. That is one reason Bush has a 24% approval rating. The fact that Congress did not initiate impeachment hearings but instead killed the investigation by granting retroactive immunity to the participating telecommunications corporations, is one reason why Congress has 9% approval ratings.
The list is long. Invading a foreign country under false pretenses should be a crime. Politicizing the Justice Department should be a crime. Failing to respond to Congressional subpoenas should be a crime. Violations of the Hatch Act should be treated as violations of the law. Ignoring the Presidential Records Act should be a crime. Outing a CIA officer and then obstructing justice during the investigation should be a crime. Under the Bush administration, all of these things have not been treated a crimes, but as political disputes. And, the fact is, the public doesn’t like that. The Left hates George W. Bush for these acts, but the middle isn’t too keen on them either.
But the middle is more concerned with issues like core competency and our reputation in the world than with the obsessions of the Left. They don’t like ignoring the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture. They don’t like watching a city like New Orleans drown while Bush and McCain eat birthday cake and Condi Rice shops for shoes and goes to a Broadway play. They don’t like the financial mess we’re in, and the plummeting value of the dollar.
On the right, they don’t like Bush because he was a big spender. They don’t like him because he brought their party and their ideology into disrepute. Many of the social conservatives hate Bush for his unilateral, interventionist foreign policy and his tolerance for illegal immigration. The Wall Street conservatives don’t like him for fiscal mismanagement and his know-nothing anti-science pandering to the religious right.
You’d never know any of this by reading Eggen’s column. In Eggen’s world, the Bushies are a little sad, but optimistic. In the rest of the world, outside the Beltway, we’re wondering if Bush and Cheney will ever face justice for their criminality. Will Congress realize that one reason that they’re so unpopular is that they have let Bush and Cheney criminally drive this country into ruin? Write me a column like that and I might find the Washington Post half as interesting as the blogosphere.
