How did we wind up with George W. Bush in the White House?
That’s not just a rhetorical question. I’ve occasionally asked it over the last 7+ years, because I genuinely wonder how we managed to get ourselves such an awful president. Was it just dumb rotten luck, or was it due to inherent problems in the system? And by “the system” I mean everything that surrounds us – the political system, the media, the American people.
I guess it’s a little bit of everything. For us to get into the horrible situation we’re in, where the next president is going to have a devil of a time trying to correct what went wrong, required a convergence of factors.
First, George W. Bush got nominated. And he got nominated because (a) he decided to run, and (b) he locked up most of the Republican establishment as early as 1998, the year he was re-elected Texas governor. There are times when an upstart can upset the establishment candidate (example: Democrats, 2008), but most of the time, if you’ve got the establishment behind you, you’ve got the nomination.
Second, he had a vulnerable opponent. Al Gore ran at the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity – and yet he only barely won the popular vote (by a mere half a percentage point), because he wasn’t a very good politician.
Third, we had a horrible press corps that had no idea what’s important in electing a president. That could be because…
…Fourth, we were in a period of apparent peace and prosperity, where many people thought it didn’t matter who got elected. (And yet we’re now in a time of fear and recession, and the press still doesn’t do a good job.)
Fifth, just plain horrible luck. Theresa LePore and her butterfly ballot cost Gore more votes than hanging chads ever did. And that led to the Florida debacle. People might have expected some states to have close votes, but who could have predicted the freakish closeness of the Florida vote? And who could have predicted that the national electoral vote would be so close that neither candidate could get 270 electoral votes without winning that freakishly close state? After all, it’s not just that Florida was freakishly close but that Florida mattered. The country went down the rabbit hole that night.
All of this helps explain how W got the presidency. But it doesn’t explain why W managed to be so awful.
Historians are always looking for the causes of events. Sometimes the causes are inherent in the system, but sometimes events are just random. Bush’s ascension to the presidency required a little of both.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand how we got here. It’s almost literary, really. If only it weren’t fiction.
He was marketed as a “good old boy.” Many people liked the way he sounded (with his manufactured Texas accent), the fact that he had a ranch (purchased just before the election), and- horrible as it may seem- because he wasn’t as smart as Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Many people could identify with his difficulty speaking in complete sentences and having out-of-control partying daughters.
People don’t see reality. They see what they want to see. The Republicans found the “perfect” candidate to beat the Demoncrats. Only problem was that while he was electable, the course of matters have proven him to be woefully inadequate–down right incompetent. When he began stepping out of line (over-spending, recklessly starting a war), the Republicans along with their power base, (Limbaugh, Robertson, etc.) refused to question or disagree with him.