Posted on 04/26/2003 12:25:02 PM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Scholars ponder Bush's presidency at midpoint
Academics gather at Princeton for forum and give mixed reviews
04/26/2003
PRINCETON, N.J. – For White House scholars, a new president is a phenomenal find.
"It's like an entomologist discovering a new insect," said Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of political science at Princeton University.
"You don't learn much in the first year," he explained. "But ... by the time you get past the second year, the presidency has really begun to leave its fingerprints on history."
So, three months past his midterm, George W. Bush is being dissected this weekend at Princeton University. And what a find he is.
As governor of Texas, he slipped into the White House, without a popular mandate, on a single vote of the U.S. Supreme Court. He quickly and successfully pressed Congress for education reforms and income-tax cuts. And after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he has twice taken the nation to war.
"He sort of limped into office and then took over," Mr. Greenstein concluded in an interview.
In the kind of full-dress seminar usually reserved for presidents on their way out of office or already out of office, the Princeton professor has assembled a wide-ranging lineup of scholars and other White House watchers to probe all aspects of the Bush administration.
There's a panel on Mr. Bush, "man and president," and others on his policies and politics and his standing at home and abroad.
"He's already destined for a remarkable place in the history books," declared Hugh Heclo, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University.
Former insider
Also offering a perspective Friday was John DiIulio, the political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who left the White House as Mr. Bush's first director of faith-based initiatives after only eight months.
Now, a sometimes nettlesome critic of the administration, Mr. DiIulio portrayed Mr. Bush as a good, decent, compassionate man who runs a tight ship of state, often driven more by politics than policy.
Working in the White House, Mr. DiIulio suggested, was akin to "drinking water from a fire plug 20 hours a day."
On Friday or Saturday, though, there were no current White House staff on the Princeton program – "The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment."
"Those guys are predictable ... and can set you up as if you are in an Ari Fleischer news briefing," Mr. Greenstein said, referring to the White House press secretary.
The White House had no comment.
Mr. Greenstein, while certainly no insider, has been inside the Bush White House. Invited by senior adviser Karl Rove, long Mr. Bush's chief political strategist, the Princeton professor was among the scholars at an early forum, organized by Mr. Rove's Office of Strategic Initiatives.
"They had printed programs," recalled Mr. Greenstein, director of leadership studies at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "There was a very academic feeling to it."
At Princeton on Friday, the early assessments of Mr. Bush and his administration were mixed, with repeated admonishments by the scholars and others that the jury was still out on him and his presidency.
Karen Hult, a political science professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, extolled in her paper the extraordinary discipline of the Bush White House and its penchant for secrecy.
"Even more striking," she said, "despite George W. Bush's distinctive agenda and approach to management and the virtually unprecedented environment that confronts him, his White House is defined more by continuity than discontinuity."
Taxes, political instincts
On the other hand, Allen Schick, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, offered a tough assessment of the president's drive to cut taxes, noting that Mr. Bush entered the White House "just about the time the stock market bubble burst, the economy weakened and federal revenues plummeted."
"It will be his successor's misfortune to enter office with an inadequate revenue base and an urgent need to push a tax increase through Congress," Mr. Schick predicted.
Mr. Greenstein praised Mr. Bush's personal and personnel skills and his "political smarts," suggesting at times he resembles a fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson.
"But unlike Lyndon Johnson, he needs help, which he gets, from the Washington professionals because he's not a creature of Washington," Mr. Greenstein said.
And, he added expectedly in the interview, he'd love to know exactly what Mr. Bush and his father, the 41st president, have been talking about these days.
"I think the dad is an important influence," Mr. Greenstein said, suggesting that father and son talk plenty about foreign affairs and other matters of "substance."
"Historians wouldn't be interested if they were talking about their golf games," Mr. Greenstein ventured.
E-mail bhillman@dallasnews.com
The author of this article must have gone to Journalism school to learn how to cram so much falsehood into a single sentence.
On the one hand, he got his tax-cut agenda, showed strong moral leadership (example: stem cells), won 2 wars..
On the other hand, he hasn't done a damn thing to advance the cause of Socialism in this country.
"mixed".
The media recount of the Florida votes showed that Bush would have won even if the Supreme Court had ruled against him that time.
LOL! As if...
Has most of the papers given.
The one paper I looked at was the usual socialist drivel.
Well, I certainly hope he just passed the ¼ point of his Presidency, not the midpoint.
It's like the sports car I bought a couple of years ago; a woman I knew asked me if it was my "mid-life crisis" car. "I certainly hope not," I replied. But, realistically, it probably was. :-(
Over 2.5 years since SCOFLA got their wrists slapped by SCOTUS for trying to legislate voting laws from the bench and they are still whining alright.
It's a better classification of living organism than was previous President Clinton, who must surely have been like the Center for Disease Control "discovering a new strain of venereal disease."
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