A recent poll shows Bush's approval having dropped from 31% to 26% now, and Cheney's dropping from 21% to 18%.
It's crazy to think that a two term President and Vice-President could be at 26% and 18% in the polls. Even unpopular national leaders tend to hover in the low 40% range. It's almost impossible to get 80% of the country to agree on anything in a poll, but after 8 years of the Bush/Cheney debacle the public is pretty together on this one. I guess George Bush really was a uniter. Heck, even if you add their approval numbers together, you still get a pretty unpopular politician.
Cheney's diminishing popularity I kind of get. Since the election he has been all over the airwaves slamming the new administration, claiming we are more likely to get attacked, and attacking Obama's economic policies. After leaving the nation in a historical economic ruin following his 8 years, that last one makes Dick Cheney an early runner for the 2009 "pure balls" award. It's almost as if someone told him "there is no way you can get less popular than 21% approval" and he took that guy up on the dare.
Bush, on the other hand, kind of surprised me. People generally liked him as a person, they just despised his policies, record, and Presidency. I figured once he was out of office and unable to do any more damage to the country, the dislike would subside and he would creep up in popularity. Further, he was classy and supportive during the transition, and has refused to bash Obama - unlike some Vice-Presidents of his I can think of. Yet he dropped 5%. Which is not easy when you are already hovering at 31% - somewhere around the approval rating Americans tend to give Somali pirates. The only thing I can figure is people watched Obama for 100 days and thought "Oh yeah, that's what having a good President was like".
Lately, the GOP has been stepping up their attacks on Obama for being "weak" on foreign policy, criticizing him for shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, and for what they saw as Obama "apologizing" for America's past actions during his trips abroad. We've seen the attacks come from the usual array of right wing elected officials, former officials, and pundits. It's not a new line of attack, throughout the whole 2008 campaign they argued Obama was too soft on foreign policy and military affairs. Indeed its the same argument they have been making against Democrats for decades. And its often been successful for them politically (just ask Presidents Kerry or Dukakis - oh, wait), so its no surprise they are trying to slap the label on Obama as well early in his Presidency.
Personally, I'm not bothered by Obama shaking hands with a foreign leader we oppose. Nor am I upset that Obama admits that America has not been perfect, even as we are a force for good in the world. These are minor symbolic acts. It's a sign of America's strength as a world power that we can deal with people we oppose, and admit when we are wrong. We aren't a petulant teenager - we are the world's most powerful country, and an example to the rest of the globe.
Bush isolated North Korea and Iran, called them both evil, and refused to talk to either country until late in his administration where he began to engage North Korea. Where did that show of "strength" get us? North Korea restarted its weapons program under Bush's watch, withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. Iran spent 8 years rapidly accelerating its own nuclear program and is now far closer to having the ability to create nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, held four summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev - a man he once claimed ran the "evil empire". These direct talks with our long time enemy produced, among other things, the INF treaty which reduced intermediate nuclear and conventional missiles. Reagan shook hands with a man many saw as an totalitarian dictator, yet parlayed the talks into achieving goals that he wanted for the country. Bush shunned regimes he (rightfully) despised, and both North Korea and Iran spent 8 years accelerating their nuclear programs. It's not a sign of weakness to negotiate, any more than its a sign of strength to refuse to. As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."
At the end of the day, results are what counts. If Obama ends up harming U.S. interests by negotiating bad deals with Venezuela, and getting suckered by Hugo Chavez - then he should be rightfully criticized. But for shaking the hand of a foreign leader at an international summit? Please. Because we all know that Republicans would never shake hands with anybody our country dislikes or finds distasteful (see picture above).
Imagine for a second if John McCain had been elected President in 2008. Now imagine that in the first couple of months President McCain had increased the number of troops in Afghanistan, slowed the pace of the drawdown in Iraq from what the left had been demanding, increased the military budget by 4%, kept on Bush's Secretary of Defense, approved predator drone strikes on Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, refused to retroactively prosecute those in the CIA who had tortured Al Qaeda suspects, and authorized a successful Navy SEAL operation to kill Somali pirates and rescue captured Americans. The right wing pundits would be besides themselves talking about what a strong President McCain turned out to be, and how muscular his foreign policy was. But of course it was Obama who did these things, and since he is a liberal Democrat he is therefore "weak" on foreign policy and the military.
Dick Cheney put down his vial of goat's blood long enough to do an interview with Sean Hannity this week. Cheney was the most secretive dude since that other famous Dick (Nixon) so it makes it especially enjoyable that he is now calling on the Obama administration to release documents about waterboarding: "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."
Cheney hasn't always been such a huge fan of transparency. There were the undisclosed locations and the fact that the VP's residence vanished (Cheney's dark magic, me thinks). Here's how historian Edward Larson described him: Commentators and comedians have ridiculed Vice President Dick Cheney for invoking executive privilege to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee while, at the same time, asserting that his office is not part of the executive branch so as to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives. As a historian, though, I admire the Vice President’s chutzpah. Rather than being laughably ridiculous, his seemingly conflicting and transparently self-serving claims on these matters have at least enough historical support to qualify as artful dodges rather than baseless evasions.
Part I
Part II Here's a link (embedding disabled for some reason).
Bush declined to critique the Obama administration in Tuesday's speech, saying the new president has enough critics and that he "deserves my silence." Former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that Obama's decisions threatened America's safety.
It's interesting to see Cheney still playing the hatchetman and fearmonger while Bush takes a much more supportive tone toward the new administration. Not sure what explains it, but I think it may be a combination of a few things:
1) There is a certain tight fraternity among ex-Presidents, and they generally take the high road and try not to directly criticize each other (at least early on). Bush is following in this classy example. And by all accounts he was very friendly and helpful to the incoming Obama administration during the transition.
2) Bush knows how ridiculous it would look for him to be criticizing the new guy after his 8 year reign of incompetence, and just months after he dumped 90% of the world's problems on the guy's lap.
3) He can play the statesman, letting Cheney look like an ass for pre-emptively blaming Obama for any future terrorist attacks.
4) He really just doesn't care that much. He was never a policy wonk, he set Presidential vacation records, and may truly just not be interested in debating economic and foreign policy any more. The last few months in office he looked like a guy who just couldn't wait until it was over. Which, coincidentally, was the look 80% of America also had.
Former VP Dick Cheney takes time out from sucking the blood of baby seals to announce that President Obama is not doing enough to prevent a terrorist attack.
A recent poll shows Bush's approval having dropped from 31% to 26% now, and Cheney's dropping from 21% to 18%.
