International Herald Tribune
By Peter Baker
Thursday, January 22, 2009
By Peter Baker
Thursday, January 22, 2009
WASHINGTON: On the plane, no longer Air Force One but now Special Air Mission 28000, they talked about the speech. George W. Bush, the former president, was heading home to Texas with his inner circle, having just left the Capitol, where his successor first thanked him for his service and then proceeded to trash it.
The Bush team had worked assiduously to make the transition smooth for Barack Obama and stayed out of the way as he used the post-election period to take leadership of the economy even before being sworn in. Now, as far as some of them were concerned, the new president had used his inaugural lectern to give the back of the hand to a predecessor who had been nothing but gracious to him.
Mark McKinnon, the political consultant who helped elect Bush twice and was on the plane Tuesday, described the mood as one more of equanimity than resentment. In an essay on The Daily Beast, the new Web magazine started by Tina Brown, McKinnon said there were good wishes for the new president and "an absence of malice one normally sees among the constituencies of the vanquished." But he also said there were "some critical reviews of the speech, complaints about taking unnecessary shots and grousing about borrowed ideas."
Obama never directly mentioned Bush's name after the ritual thank you at the beginning of his Inaugural Address but the context of some of his remarks was lost on no one. He criticized "our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age." He promised to "restore science to its rightful place." He rejected "as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." He assured the rest of the world "that we are ready to lead once more."
Some writers concluded that it was the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933, that an incoming president used his Inaugural Address to so evidently repudiate his predecessor as he headed for the door.
Obama quickly followed words with action. The day after the inauguration, on his first full day in office, he instructed military commanders to draft a plan to withdraw combat forces from Iraq and on Thursday he plans to sign executive orders closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and reversing Bush's policies on interrogations.
Bush knew that was coming as he winged his way back to Midland, Texas, on Tuesday. Aboard the big blue-and-white jet that afternoon were some of his most loyal confidants - Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett, Andrew Card Jr., Donald Evans, Joshua Bolten, Ed Gillespie, Margaret Spellings, Clay Johnson, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers and others.
McKinnon described Bush's spirits as high. "While I expected the president's mood to be defiant, bitter, defensive or vengeful toward his critics, he was anything but," McKinnon wrote. The passengers were shown a 22-minute film produced by Scott Sforza and edited by Laura Crawford celebrating the Bush presidency.
When Bush landed, he told a waiting crowd of supporters that he left Washington with his head held high. "When I go home tonight and I look into the mirror, I'm not going to regret what I see," he said.
But if Bush was not eager to lash back at his critics, some of his loyalists were. In the hours since the Bush plane landed and the former president began his new life out of office, his defenders have begun pushing back. Two of his former top aides, Rove and Marc Thiessen, a White House speechwriter, have newspaper columns out Thursday implicitly rebutting Obama.
Rove wrote in The Wall Street Journal that as his former boss departed Washington, "in a last angry frenzy his critics again distorted his record, maligned his character and repeated untruths about his years in the Oval Office," adding that "nothing they wrote or said changes the essential facts."
Rove went on to define Bush's legacy as the two of them see it. Bush, he wrote, was ultimately right about Iraq and right about his tactics in the war on terrorism. He cut taxes "for every American who pays taxes," appointed conservative judges, began an unprecedented campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs and introduced the No Child Left Behind education accountability program.
"He didn't get everything right - no president does - but he got the most important things right," Rove wrote. "And that is enough."
Thiessen, in The Washington Post, focused his argument on the fact that terrorists never struck American soil again after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, calling that Bush's singular legacy. "If Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible - and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation," he wrote.
The opening shots signal what could be a sustained debate in the coming months and years between Bush and Obama partisans over the nature of the former president's record and what he left his successor to deal with.
Bush himself has said he plans to stay out of "the klieg lights" and let the new president govern without criticism. His defenders took no such pledge. They understand that victors write the history, but they are determined to make sure they get a crack at shaping that narrative themselves.
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