I caught a good deal of it yesterday morning, and there were a couple bits I wanted to comment on:
Q — that you think the Republican Party needs to be more inclusive. Who needs to hear that message inside the Republican Party?
THE PRESIDENT: You see, I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here’s a litmus test you must adhere to.
This party will come back. But the party’s message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And — take, for example, the immigration debate. That’s obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of the debate was that some people said, well, Republicans don’t like immigrants. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that’s what — that’s the image that came out.
And, you know, if the image is we don’t like immigrants, then there’s probably somebody else out there saying, well, if they don’t like the immigrants, they probably don’t like me, as well. And so my point was, is that our party has got to be compassionate and broad-minded.
I remember the 1964 elections. My dad happened to be running for the United State Senate then and, you know, got landslided with the Johnson landslide in the state of Texas. But it wasn’t just George Bush who got defeated; the Republican Party was pretty well decimated at the time. At least that’s what they — I think that’s how the pundits viewed it. And then ’66 there was a resurgence. And the same thing can happen this time, but we just got to make sure our message is broad-gauged and compassionate; that we care about people’s lives, and we’ve got a plan to help them improve their lives.
After watching the presser, I headed off to work an on the radio was Laura Ingraham – I highly respect this lady for the passion of her address and the good humor with which she approaches issues, but as regards President Bush and immigration, the good lady goes a bit bonkers. One of the first questions which came to my mind as the rant about how President Bush mucked up immigration reform spilled from the radio was, “so, you think you’re going to get a better deal under Obama?”.
For full disclosure, I was one of the baker’s dozen or so people who backed the Bush immigration plan – and I fully understand the ire of people concerning the flood of illegals which walked across our borders over the past 20 years. But, then again, we pretty much did everything but send them an engraved invitation – to fault President Bush, decades into the problem, for not rounding up 12 million or so people and deporting them was asinine…and if we get past the deportation issue, then there remains the problem of what to do with the people who are here. Call it amnesty if you want, but President Bush was on the right track, and it would have done four things:
1. Stopped the flow of illegals as there would be no reason to be an illegal anymore.
2. Brought illegals into the legitimate economy where they can properly pay taxes and have health insurance, etc and thus stop burdening the taxpayers.
3. Ended the issue and not left it for Obama and his liberal Democrats to work out a new comprehensive “reform” which will be amnesty, pure and simple.
4. It would have made the GOP the party which did the right thing vis a vis our largest and fastest growing ethnic group, hispanics. That right there was about 2 million votes lost for the GOP – if you figure on what GW managed to pull in 2004 and what McCain pulled in 2008. Not enough, in and of itself, to tip the election back to us, but anyone who wants to throw away 2 million votes just to be an immigration purist is a fool.
In the larger sense, what the conservative complaints about President Bush boiled down to was a carp about President Bush not adhering to a purely Reaganite line…but, then again, neither did Reagan. And don’t you see? You can’t just follow the script – you sometimes have to do what you think is best, even if its not ideologically pure. Too often we on the right over the past 10 years have shot ourselves in the foot because we insisted on making the perfect the enemy of the good. Liberals do this, too – and, indeed, they do it more than we do (it takes a real fanatic, for instance, to argue against the Born Alive Act) – but because they are fools doesn’t mean we have to be, too. What I’m saying here, fellow conservatives, is to remember that politics is the art of the possible.
Then there’s this bit:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, in recent days, there’s been a fair amount of discussion in legal circles about whether or not you might give preemptive pardons, pardons in advance, to officials of your administration who engaged in anything from harsh interrogation tactics to perhaps dismissing U.S. attorneys. I’d like to know, have you given any consideration to this? And are you planning on it?
THE PRESIDENT: I won’t be discussing pardons here at this press conference.
The translation of the question: “Are you going to pardon all the war criminals in your Administration?”. Deftly handled, and then President Bush graciously allowed the reporter (from the New York times, naturally) to have a second go at it:
Q And I’m not trying to play “gotcha,” but I wonder, when you look back over the long arc of your presidency, do you think, in retrospect, that you have made any mistakes? And if so, what is the single biggest mistake that you may have made?
THE PRESIDENT: Gotcha. I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a “Mission Accomplished” on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.
I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina — you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and — is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission. And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, how could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?
I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the ’04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform. And the reason why is, is that — you know, one of the lessons I learned as governor of Texas, by the way, is legislative branches tend to be risk-adverse. In other words, sometimes legislatures have the tendency to ask, why should I take on a hard task when a crisis is not imminent? And the crisis was not imminent for Social Security as far as many members of Congress was concerned.
As an aside, one thing I proved is that you can actually campaign on the issue and get elected. In other words, I don’t believe talking about Social Security is the third rail of American politics. I, matter of fact, think that in the future, not talking about how you intend to fix Social Security is going to be the third rail of American politics.
One thing about the presidency is that you can make — only make decisions, you know, on the information at hand. You don’t get to have information after you’ve made the decision. That’s not the way it works. And you stand by your decisions, and you do your best to explain why you made the decisions you made.
There have been disappointments. Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way.
Anyway, I think historians will look back and they’ll be able to have a better look at mistakes after some time has passed. Along Jake’s question, there is no such thing as short-term history. I don’t think you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time has passed: Where does a President’s — did a President’s decisions have the impact that he thought they would, or he thought they would, over time? Or how did this President compare to future Presidents, given a set of circumstances that may be similar or not similar? I mean, there’s — it’s just impossible to do. And I’m comfortable with that.
In a nutshell, that is the description of what being President is like – the attempt to make the right decisions with the full knowledge that no matter what you do, there is always a way to second guess it later and, additionally, there will always be critics. Fortunately for himself – and for us – President Bush is a very centered and reasonable man who is upheld in his day to day living by faith in God. After 8 years of being through the meatgrinder of American politics and having the most wickedly false slanders launched against him, he’s still the same man who came to town…gracious, thoughtful and unwilling to get into a pissing match with those who hammered him for years.
In a way, I already miss President Bush – he’s still in office, but of course its more the illusion of a Presidency at this point…unless there’s a crisis, there will be no further call for President Bush, and even if there is a crisis he’ll have the wisdom to immediately bring Obama in and not make any decisions without his knowledge and consent, given that whatever decisions are made now will be carried through by Obama, for good or ill. I’m going to miss him more as time goes on – and unless Obama turns out to be all I don’t expect him to be, the whole nation and the whole world will come to miss him, too.
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