and what people might these be?
Was Roosevelt a good president?
Condoleeza Rice said in a newspaper interview last week that President Bush will some day rank in leadership history alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Which begs the question: Was Roosevelt a good president?
If Roosevelt is George W. Bush's model for leadership, his first term begins to make sense.
Roosevelt led the nation through World War II and certainly contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan – for which we should all be thankful.
However, Roosevelt also arguably presided over the creation of more unconstitutional domestic action by the federal government than any of his modern predecessors. As such, he remains the hero of modern-day socialists and an icon for today's Democratic Party extremists.
Is that what Bush wants to be remembered for?
If so, he must give himself extremely high marks. Yes, he has ably led the nation in the war on terrorism. But his administration has also given us unprecedented domestic spending increases.
Perhaps Rice and Bush should also be reminded that while Churchill provided great leadership of the United Kingdom in World War II, he was quickly turned out of office at the war's conclusion.
My guess is Bush will be turned out of office long before American achieves a victory in the war on terrorism. So, perhaps there is some validity to that comparison as well.
Notice that Rice did not compare Bush to a more recent popular Republican, two-term president – Ronald Reagan. Perhaps she understood that such a comparison would be laughable to too many Americans – especially those Bush still hopes to win over before Election Day.
"Statesmanship has to be judged first and foremost by whether you recognize historic opportunities and seize them," Rice said in an interview with Cox Newspapers.
I would agree. But I would not agree that Bush has met the challenge.
He came into office with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Senate. He saw that control strengthened in mid-term elections in 2002. Yet he governed like a Democrat – expanding spending for the Department of Education and other agencies the GOP once swore to eliminate.
"When you think of statesmen, you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better – historic change for the better," said Rice.
Roosevelt and Truman understood the challenges of communism? Who does she think gave us Alger Hiss? And who does she think sold Chiang Kai-Shek down the Yangtze River?
Until I read this interview, I had an extraordinary amount of respect for Rice's intellectual achievements and her understanding of history. No longer. But it gets worse.
It was Bush, she said, who first recognized "that it was time to stop mumbling about the need for a Palestinian state" and spoke out in favor of a two-state solution to the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.
Indeed he did – one of the foreign policy tragedies of his administration. In fact, he has retreated from that position recently, suggesting there was no longer any rush to create a Palestinian state. And why should we want to create a new Middle East state that was founded on terrorism? Why should we support a state whose official policy is "no Jews allowed"? Why should we want to continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results?
Does Rice really believe all she said in this interview? Or is she just being a good political soldier? It's hard to know for sure.
But now I know why the Bush administration has achieved so little in four years. Apparently, from the get-go, it never had the right goals.
Without the right goals, there can be no successful Presidency. Why the absence of any comparison to Ronald Reagan? We will see the verdict the American people will render in November.