As if GWB ever saw himself as a “war president”. He thought he was going to working on HSAs and privatization of SS. Who knows what might’ve happened in those two areas if 9/11 hadn’t happened?
“As if GWB ever saw himself as a ‘war president’. He thought he was going to working on HSAs and privatization of SS.”
How Bush viewed himself in 2000 is irrelevant to the current discussion. Once terror hit, he certainly changed his view. Bush all too deliberately focused on war.
The thing about Obama is—though he’s barely, if at all, deviated from Bush’s war policies—he sees himself exactly as he pretended to be during the campaign. That is, the anti-Bush, vaguely pacifistic and representative of a New Way. He’d like to change everything relating to American world strategy in one sweep, if he could. But as reality is complicated (and he never had any practice running anything anyway), Obama’s changed almost nothing. Which can be hand-waved by constant reference to the burdens of what you’d imagine were centuries of misrule under Bush if you didn’t know better.