The votes against Obama’s stimulus package came from a Southern confederacy of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Their message to America? Drop dead.

Michael Lind (Daily Beast)
On Wednesday, January 28, 2009, President Barack Obama’s $819 billion stimulus plan passed the House of Representatives, despite the solid opposition of the Confederates.
By the Confederates I mean the Republican Party and their allies among Southern conservative Democrats. The battle in Washington is not between liberals and conservatives; it is between the Union and the South.
The Republican Party that voted unanimously against the stimulus bill is, in essence, the party of the former Confederacy. In the House of Representatives, there is not a single Republican representative from New England. In the U.S. Senate, there is not a single Republican from the Pacific Coast.
The battle in Washington is not between liberals and conservatives; it is between the Union and the South.
The Republican congressional delegation is disproportionately Southern. Half of the four congressional leaders of the Republican Party are Southerners: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Virginia). (Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl is from Arizona and House Minority Leader John Boehner is a relic of the dying Midwestern wing of the GOP). The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mike Duncan, is from Kentucky. Half of the candidates for the RNC chairmanship are Southerners: Duncan himself, Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, and Chip Saltsman, former chairman of the Republican Party of Tennessee. (The other three are Michael Steele of Maryland, Ken Blackwell of Ohio and, Saul Anuzis of Michigan.) If you think most GOP spokesmen on TV seem to speak with a drawl, you’re not imagining things.
In addition, a majority of the 11 House Democrats who voted against the stimulus bill are Southerners or from states that border the South: Bobby Bright and Parker Griffith, both of Alabama; Gene Taylor, of Mississippi; Heath Shuler, of North Carolina; Jim Cooper, of Tennessee; Allen Boyd, Jr., of Florida; Frank M. Kratovil, of Maryland; and Brad Ellsworth, of Indiana. (The other three are Walt Minnick of Idaho, John Peterson and Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania.) Congressman Boyd, a prominent Blue Dog Democrat, was the only Democrat to support President Bush’s bill to partly privatize Social Security, which he co-sponsored. Appropriately, his 2nd Congressional District in the Florida Panhandle near Georgia and Alabama includes Dixie and Calhoun counties.
Do you see a pattern here?
The vote about the stimulus package was not about economics. It was about nullification. It was the bipartisan Confederacy sending a message to the rest of America, stricken by the greatest crisis since the Depression. That message? DROP DEAD.
Those who think that the Democrats could have won over more Republicans by making more concessions do not understand the neo-Confederate/Dixiecrat mentality. There was no one to bargain with on the other side. The Republiconfederate “alternative”—a joke of a bill consisting almost entirely of tax cuts—would not be taken seriously by any mainstream conservative economist. It was pure provocation.
The rest of the country needs to understand. This is not the nation-minded Republican Party of Lincoln and McKinley, Eisenhower and Dole. Nor is it the party of Herbert Hoover who, if he were alive, would be denounced by the Southern Right as the flawed but public-spirited Progressive he was. No, this is the party that was hijacked after the civil-rights revolution by former Democrats on the Southern far right. Its spiritual ancestors are the old states’ rights Southern conservative Democrats, like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis and Strom Thurmond and Orval Faubus. The slogan of the segregationist Democrats—“massive resistance”—characterizes today’s Southern conservative resistance to necessary federal economic action, just as it inspired yesterday’s Southern conservative resistance to equal rights for black Americans.
The new Republican Party is a strange version of the old Democratic Party. It's the Dixiecrat wing without any other wings. The morphing of the Grand Old Party into a Southern-dominated faction goes back half a century to the so-called Southern Strategy to win a slice of the Southern vote in the Electoral College. Under George W. Bush, it would have seemed that this strategy reached its climax. But after the utter repudiation of Bush's presidency and the experiment with conservative Republican Party rule, the congressional Republicans left in the rubble are turning even more to the right—and the South.
Next time a Southern Republican or Blue Dog Democrat frets about big government, remind him or her of the Confederate Constitution, a bizarre document that sheds light on the mentality of today’s Southern conservatives. Southern opposition to capable national government is nothing new. In the Confederate Constitution, provisions modeled on those of the US Constitution that empowered the federal government of the Confederate States of America were followed by clauses frantically limiting the very powers that had just been bestowed.
According to Section 8 of the Confederate Constitution, the Confederate Constitution shall have power:To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises for revenue, necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and carry on the Government of the Confederate States; but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry; and all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the Confederate States.
This is the only constitution in history, to my knowledge, which banned the government from promoting and fostering branches of national industry. But it gets better. Here’s Section 8 (3), giving the Confederate Congress the power:(3) To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes; but neither this, nor any other clause contained in the Constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce; except for the purpose of furnishing lights, beacons, and buoys, and other aids to navigation upon the coasts, and the improvement of harbors and the removing of obstructions in river navigation; in all which cases such duties shall be laid on the navigation facilitated thereby as may be necessary to pay the costs and expenses thereof.
Imagine that. The Confederates, in their constitution, tried to ban all government infrastructure spending to facilitate commerce, but then had second thoughts and included lights, beacons, buoys, and harbors—but nothing else, really, we mean it! The political descendants of these people are the ones who today want to bind the Confederate—excuse me, I mean the US Congress to rigid and inflexible “pay-go” rules no matter what the circumstances and, like the Confederates, want to make transportation rely on user fees like tolls on interstate highways rather than pay for public goods out of taxes.
It is because I am a Southerner and the descendant of Southerners that I recognize the suicidal nature of this pathological regional political culture. I like Southern manners, food, music, and literature—but I hate the reactionary strain of my native region’s politics (there is an enlightened, minority strain in Southern politics, from the Kentuckians Clay and Lincoln to LBJ, the Gores and Bill Clinton). The greatest victims of Southern conservatism have always been the majority of Southerners of all races.
The Republican/Blue Dog approach to political economy was tried in my part of the country for generations, and the result was economic backwardness and military defeat. The antebellum South was hostile to government promotion of industry and investment in public transportation—and, ultimately, the Union, relying on the factories and railroads of the North, crushed it. Unable to compete on the basis of public investment and public education, the South in the 21st century, like a broken-down banana republic, now uses anti-union laws and low taxes to lure corporate investment in low-wage factories.
So let’s be clear. The battle over the stimulus is not a gentle debate among thoughtful libertarians and well-intentioned progressives, with reasonable points made on both sides. It is nullification. It is sabotage. It is the latest episode in the Southern conservative strategy of massive resistance to necessary government and national progress. It will not be the last.
UPDATE: This article originally misstated the Republican congressional delegation as the Southern congressional delegation.
Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.

California teeters on the edge of the worst drought in the state's history,

SF CHRONICLE

Officials said Thursday after reporting that the Sierra Nevada snowpack - the backbone of the state's water supply - is only 61 percent of normal.
January usually douses California with about 20 percent of the state's annual precipitation, but instead it delivered a string of dry, sunny days this year, almost certainly pushing the state into a third year of drought.
The arid weather is occurring as the state's water system is under pressure from a growing population, an aging infrastructure and court-ordered reductions in water pumped through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - problems that didn't exist or were less severe during similar dry spells in the late 1970s and late 1980s.
"We're definitely in really bad shape," said Elissa Lynn, chief meteorologist with the state Department of Water Resources. "People can expect to pay higher prices for produce ... and more agencies may be rationing ... some raising fees. We just don't have enough water."
In Sonoma County, water managers are expected to take a bold step Monday - telling residents to prepare for severe rationing within weeks.
"We have entered uncharted territory," said Pam Jeane, deputy chief engineer of operations at the Sonoma County Water Agency. "A 30 percent mandatory rationing order is just the beginning. Further decline in reservoir levels could necessitate 50 percent cutbacks."
After two consecutive dry years and with a third on the way, Lake Mendocino, one of two main reservoirs that supply 750,000 residents in Marin and Sonoma counties, contains only 32,000 acre-feet of water - about one-third of its capacity of 90,000 acre-feet. (One acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre at a depth of one foot, enough to meet the needs of one to two families each year).
The picture is similar around the state. Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is at 31 percent of its capacity, down from 74 percent in 2007.
By now, water planners had hoped a series of strong storms would fill up reservoirs and make further rationing unnecessary. But a high-pressure system parked over Northern California has kept skies clear and warm through most of the winter.
Thursday's snow survey by the Department of Water Resources found that the snow's water content - the snowpack - across the Sierra Nevada was 61 percent of normal for this time of year. Last year at this time, the snowpack was 111 percent of normal, but the driest spring on record led to a drought.
The saturation level of snow, or the snow's water content, is the most important factor affecting the crucial spring runoff levels, which help water planners determine water supplies for their districts each season.
If Sonoma County institutes 50 percent rationing, it would be the Bay Area's most drastic measure so far to address the drought. Last spring, the East Bay Municipal Utility District announced 15 percent rationing and added extra drought fees.
Many other districts are relying on voluntary cutbacks. San Francisco has asked users to trim water use by 10 percent. But the city and others could move to rationing this spring, potentially barring customers from filling pools, washing cars or watering lawns.
No customers would suffer more than agricultural districts in Central Valley, where farmers expect they will receive no water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for their alfalfa, corn, pears and almonds. Critics charge farmers with wasting water by flooding fields and growing low-value crops. But growers insist they are increasing efficiency at the same time they supply the nation with critical food supplies.
Wine is not a critical food supply, but the economies of Napa and Sonoma counties stand to lose tens of millions of dollars if the drought squeezes this year's grape harvest. Already, there are signs that vines are sprouting early - exposing grapes to frost for a longer period of time.
Like commercial farmers in the Central Valley, grape growers might be forced to water some plots and not others.
"If you have limited water, and you don't have the irrigation to keep it going ... it's not going to be a bumper crop," said Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used Thursday's snow survey to pitch his answer to California's water crisis - a $9 billion-plus water bond that would funnel money toward new dams, reservoirs, water recycling programs and conservation efforts. The governor also supports building a giant pipeline, called a peripheral canal, around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to reduce pressure on the ailing water system.
In 2007, a federal judge said operators of the giant export pumps near Tracy must curtail pumping in order to save the endangered delta smelt, a tiny fish.
to maintain moisture in soil.
E-mail Kelly Zito at kzito@sfchronicle.com

culturebox (Slate)
Dear John :What I'll miss about John Updike.

By John Irving

Like most men my age—I am a decade younger than John Updike—I began reading him because of the sex. I was still in prep school when I first read Rabbit, Run, in college when I read The Centaur. I had finished with the Iowa Writers' Workshop and had my first teaching job when I read Couples, which was published around the time I published my first novel, Setting Free the Bears. People were always critical of what Updike wrote about; I always defended him because he wrote so well. He was one of those writers who taught me: You're a writer because you can write well, not because of your "subject."
Like Margaret Atwood, Updike was unafraid—he didn't write the same novel over and over again. OK, there were the Rabbit novels, and the Bech stories; and after the marvelous witches (of Eastwick), they came back, most recently, as widows. What made the sex different was that it was elegant, refined—yet no less inappropriate, or nasty, when Updike wanted it to be. Kurt Vonnegut said there are writers who, if it hadn't worked out for them to be writers, would be in jail. There were writers who simply couldn't have made a living for themselves if the writing hadn't worked out; that meant Vonnegut, and that meant me. But Updike always gave me the impression that he could have/would have been successful at anything. He was smart; not all writers are intellectuals. I'm not. He was, but he was good-humored about it; he never flaunted it.
He was also a quick study. His novel Terrorist was criticized by the sudden abundance of terror experts; Updike didn't get this right, or he didn't correctly understand this element, or—whatever. I thought the novel was an amazingly quick study, and an insightful one. I cared about the characters—something many intellectuals who write fiction don't get at all.
We weren't friends. We knew each other socially for the brief period of time when I lived in Massachusetts—in Cambridge—and he was in Beverly Farms. We had dinner together a few times. We had a polite but not frequent correspondence, too. For a period of time—no longer—fans used to confuse the two of us. How could this have happened? Because we were both "John"? It was baffling, but I got numerous fan letters that were meant for him, and he got fan letters that were meant for me, and this gave us the occasion to write to each other—and send the misdirected fan mail to each other. This has stopped; it hasn't happened in five or six years. Maybe this was mail from a single demented village or the same deranged family; maybe it was generational, and they've died out—those idiots who thought I was John Updike and John Updike was me.
The letters would begin "Dear John Irving," and I would read for a while before I realized that the letter-writer was talking about an Updike novel; it was the same for him. I admit that I miss this craziness; it will probably never happen again.
Look at all he did! The novels, the short stories, the poems, the essays, and criticism; he was productive, and envied. I read him because I always knew I would be entertained. His writing was lively; there was a constant energy in the language, and a mirth—a great good humor.
Once, when he came to dinner, my middle son, Brendan, was in a phase of dressing up—disguises, voices with accents, bizarre enactments. Updike and I were having dinner when Brendan appeared in a kimono; he was holding a lit candle, and something that looked like (or was) a microphone. "Good evening," Brendan said. "This is the news in Japanese." And then he went into an incomprehensible imitation of Japanese news; it was pretty convincing. (I think Brendan must have been 8 or 10 at the time.)
That was all. Brendan left, with a bow, and we went back to our dinner. Updike had never met Brendan before.
When we were saying good night, Updike asked: "The news, in Japanese—is it a regular event?"
"No, just for us," I said; I couldn't think of what else to say. Brendan had never done it before, nor would he ever do it again.
"Well, that was … special," Updike said.
I shall miss him, and his fan mail.John Irving is a novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Soft-spoken line from Washington may terrify Tehran

The Guardian
Ahmadinejad's ferocity underlines the potency of the new policy of seeking to influence rather than oust the ayatollahs
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The letter to Iran being drafted in Washington represents a determined break from past US policy but officials said yesterday there was still considerable debate on how and when to engage Tehran in talks.
Details have yet to be decided. At what level should talks take place? Should they grow organically from the existing six-nation negotiating group or open up a new track? When should negotiations start and, in particular, should they be postponed until Iran's presidential elections in June, for fear of helping Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election campaign, which was formally launched yesterday?
There is one thing everyone agrees on – it is impossible to do any kind of business with the current Iranian president. Ahmadinejad's speech in Kermanshah yesterday, demanding complete US withdrawal from all overseas deployments, clearly illustrated that.
"Those who say they want to make change, this is the change they should make: they should apologise to the Iran­ian nation and try to make up for their dark background and the crimes they have committed against the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said. He specifically mentioned the toppling of the government in 1953, the support for the shah and for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, and the downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988.
He fulminated against what he said were efforts to block Tehran's supposedly peaceful nuclear power programme and hinder Iran's development since the 1979 revolution, the event which along with the US embassy hostage crisis served to define bilateral relations for a generation.
And he had harsh words for George Bush, who he said "has gone into the trash can of history with a very black and shameful file full of treachery and killings. He left and, God willing, he will go to hell."
It was never clear whether the Bush administration was seeking to bring about regime change in Tehran or simply trying to persuade Iran's theocratic rulers to change policy on uranium enrichment.
The ambiguity was inevitable. The administration itself never quite made up its mind, and different strategies rose to the top of the White House agenda at different times, depending on who was winning the battle for the president's ear.
While mixed messages emanated from the Bush administration, only one was clearly received in Tehran – that Iran was next on the Axis of Evil list after Iraq.
The lesson of the Iraq invasion for the Iranian leadership was that Saddam lost his job and then his life not because he might have had weapons of mass destruction but because he had none. North Korea, the third member the axis, which had nuclear bombs, was treated with much greater respect. The hard task ahead for the Obama team is how to correct those perverse incentives.
Obama is intent on pursuing a very different approach. US policy is focused now on influencing the ayatollahs' behaviour and perceptions, not driving them out. The new president this week repeated his inaugural line, "we will extend our hand if you will unclench your fist", and explicitly addressed it to Tehran. The ferocity of Ahmadinejad's response does make one thing clear: the Tehran hardliners are more terrified of a moderate and charismatic new voice from Washington than all the sabres rattled by the Bush administration.
Obama does not trigger the same Persian-nationalist response that used to rally Iranians around Ahmadinejad's government at the prospect of American bombs. Perhaps more importantly, given the nature of Iranian elections, the arrival of a soft-talking administration may change the mind of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sort of president he wants to see elected.
The more radical thinkers now installed at their desks in Washington argue there is no need to wait until the June presidential elections. The Iranian presidency does not decide nuclear policy, even if it influences the political mood and sets limits on what is negotiable.
That wing argues there are ways of sending messages and making contacts that will not benefit Ahmadinejad. The opening of an American-staffed US interests section in Tehran, considered then rejected by the Bush administration, is on the table as a first step in a possible progression towards a normal relationship.
The administration radicals believe it is time to invert what they see as another fundamental flaw in Bush policy – tying US interests to reactionary Sunni regimes in the Arab world as a bulwark against Shia militancy. Tehran is militant, the new thinkers argue, but it is at least a rational state actor, with defined goals and interests, and therefore ultimately more amenable to cool discussion and engagement.
The more cautious wing warns against hasty interference in an opaque political system with all the unintended consequences that might entail.

John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT (NY TIMES)
John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.
The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike had died at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers.
Of Mr. Updike’s many novels and stories, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public more than his precisely observed tales about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings.
His best-known protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the funny, restless and questing life of this middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.
“My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”
From his earliest short stories, he found his subject in the everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce, setting them most often in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he described as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid.” He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.
Here he is in “A Sense of Shelter,” an early short story:
“Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”
The detail of his writing was so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction: those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that it was more style than content.
The latter position was defined by James Wood in the 1999 essay “John Updike’s Complacent God.”
“He is a prose writer of great beauty,” Mr. Wood wrote, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.”
Astonishingly industrious and prolific, Mr. Updike turned out three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism or verse, proving the maxim that several pages a day was at least a book a year — or more. Mr. Updike published 60 books in his lifetime; his final one, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is to be published in June.
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
His vast output of poetry, which tended toward light verse, and his wide-ranging essays and criticism filled volume after volume. Among them are “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf” (1996), “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989), “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) and “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989). One famous article was on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.
As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s novels sometimes became more exotic and experimental in form, locale and subject matter. “The Coup” (1978) was set in an imaginary African country. “Brazil” (1994) was a venture in magic realism. “Toward the End of Time” (1997) was set in 2020, after a war between the United States and China. “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000) was about Hamlet’s mother and uncle. And “The Terrorist” (2006) was a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.
Mr. Updike never abandoned short stories, of which he turned out several hundred, most of them first appearing in The New Yorker. It was here that he exercised his exquisitely sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic routine and the conflicts that animated it for him — between present satisfaction and future possibility, between sex and spirituality, and between the beauty of creation and the looming threat of death, which he summed up famously in the concluding sentence of “Pigeon Feathers,” the title story of his second collection (1962).
The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”
Philip Roth, one of Mr. Updike’s literary peers, said Tuesday: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
Growing Up
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington. He was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher of Dutch descent, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who later also published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere. His was a solitary childhood made more so by his family’s move when he was 13 to his mother’s birthplace, on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, Pa. From there both he and his father commuted 11 miles to school in town, but the isolation fired the boy’s imagination as well as his desire to take flight from aloneness.
Sustained by hours of reading in the local library and by his mother’s encouragement to write, he aspired first to be either an animator for Walt Disney or a magazine cartoonist. But a sense of narrative was implanted early, perhaps nurtured by summer work as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, for which he wrote several feature articles.
After graduating from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president, Mr. Updike attended Harvard College on a scholarship. Although he majored in English and wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon, he continued his cartooning. In 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.
Graduating from Harvard in 1954 summa cum laude, he won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. In June of that year, his short story “Friends From Philadelphia” was accepted, along with a poem, by The New Yorker. It was an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”
Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth, the couple returned to America, and Mr. Updike went to work writing Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker.
Two years later, with the arrival of a second child, David, the couple, needing more space, moved to Ipswich, Mass., an hour north of Boston, where Mr. Updike kept his ties to The New Yorker but concentrated on his poetry and fiction. In 1959, a third child, Michael, was born, followed the next year by a fourth, Miranda.
Early Works
The move to Ipswich proved creatively invigorating. By 1959 Mr. Updike had completed three books — a volume of poetry, “The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures,” a novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” and a collection of stories, “The Same Door” — and placed them with Alfred A. Knopf, which remained his publisher throughout his career. From 1954 to 1959, he also published more than a hundred essays, articles, poems and short stories in The New Yorker.
The move to a small town also seemed to stimulate his memories of Shillington and his creation of its fictional counterpart, Olinger. All his early stories were set there or in a neighboring city modeled on Reading, as were his first four novels, “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur,” “Of the Farm” and “Rabbit, Run.” “The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), avoiding the usual coming-of-age tale of most beginners, established Mr. Updike’s reputation as an important novelist. Based on an old people’s home near Shillington, the novel explores the homogenization of society among members of the author’s grandfather’s generation.
“The Centaur” (1963), more autobiographical, welds the Greek myth of Chiron, the wounded centaur who gives up his immortality for the release of Prometheus, to the story of a mocked Olinger high-school science teacher who sacrifices himself for his son. It won the 1964 National Book Award for fiction.
“Of the Farm” (1965), set not far from Olinger, focuses on the mother of a farm family who fears she will die before her son, gone into advertising in New York, will fulfill her dream of his becoming a poet.
With “Couples” (1968), his fifth novel, Mr. Updike moved his setting away from Pennsylvania to the fictional Tarbox, Mass. There he explores sexual coupling and uncoupling in a community of young married couples who, as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “wanted to get away from the staleness of Old America and the vulgarity of the new; who wanted to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in renovated houses in absolutely authentic rural centers.” “Couples,” which became a best seller, was for its time remarkably frank about sex and became well known for its lengthy detail and often lyrical descriptions of sexual acts.
With the Rabbit quartet, Mr. Updike cast his keen eye on a still wider world. Where “Rabbit, Run” plays out its present-tense narrative in domestic squalor, its three sequels, published in 10-year intervals, encompass the later 20th century American experience: “Rabbit Redux” (1971) the cultural turmoil of the 1960s; “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) the boom years of the 1970s, the oil crisis and inflation; and “Rabbit at Rest” (1991), set in the time of what Rabbit calls “Reagan’s reign,” with its trade war with Japan, its AIDS epidemic and the terror bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Rabbit lies dying in a hospital at the end of the last volume, overweight, worn-out, felled by a coronary infarction during a one-on-one basketball game. With his life over, many critics judged that Rabbit had entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, joining Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like.
“Rabbit Redux” was considered the weakest of the set, but “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” both won Pulitzer Prizes and other awards. Reissued as a set in 1995, “Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy” was pronounced by some to be a contender for the crown of great American novel.
As a small-town businessman of limited scope, Rabbit is obviously very different from his creator. Yet the two of them share a middle-American view of the world, with the difference that Mr. Updike was exquisitely self-conscious. Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life.
He took up golf, which he played with passionate enthusiasm and also a writer’s eye, noting the grace notes in others’ swings and tiny variations in the landscape. He was a tall, handsome man with a prominent nose and a head of hair that Tom Wolfe once compared to “monkish thatch.” It eventually turned white, as did his bushy eyebrows, giving him a senatorial appearance. And though as a youth he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis, he became a person of immense charm, unfailingly polite and gracious in public.
As a citizen of Ipswich, he participated in local affairs, serving on the Congregational Church building committee and the Democratic town committee and writing a pageant for the town’s 17th-Century Day. For a while he worked downtown, in an office above a restaurant. Although politically liberal, he was virtually alone among American writers to declare himself in support of the Vietnam War.
In 1974 he separated from Mary and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. In 1976 the Updikes were divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Mass., and then in 1984 in Beverly Farms, both towns in the same corner of the state as Ipswich.
In addition to his wife, Martha, he is survived by his sons David, of Cambridge, Mass., and Michael, of Newburyport, Mass.; his daughters Miranda, of Ipswich, and Elizabeth, of Maynard, Mass.; three stepsons, John Bernhard, of Lexington, Mass., Jason Bernhard, of Brooklyn, and Frederic Bernhard, of New Canaan, Conn.; seven grandchildren, and seven step-grandchildren.
A Book a Year
With the storehouse of his youthful experience emptying and his material circumstances enriched — the bestselling “Couples” put its author’s face on the cover of Time magazine — he nevertheless determined to keep publishing a book a year.
“Writing’s gotten to be a habit,” he told Michiko Kakutani in an interview with The Times in 1982, a year after “Rabbit Is Rich” was published. “Sometimes the books do seem kind of silly and very papery, but there are moments when a sentence or a series of sentences clicks.”
Among the dozen or more novels he brought out in the next quarter century, some clicked, like “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984), celebrated by some as an exuberant sexual comedy and a satirical view of women’s liberation. It was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.
He returned to the witches in another novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” published in October, portraying them as widows revisiting the town. No longer preying on men as they once did, they are now “ordinary women,” Ms. Kakutani wrote in her review, “haunted by the sins of their youth, frightened of the looming prospect of the grave and trying their best to get by, day by day by day.”
Other later Updike novels seemed schematic, like the author’s three takes on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”: “Roger’s Version” (1986), “S” (1988) and “A Month of Sundays” (1975). “Memories of the Ford Administration” (1992), linking personal guilt to history; “Seek My Face” (2002), an improvisation on the life of Jackson Pollock; and “Villages” (2004), about small-town adultery, also found lukewarm receptions.
Some readers complained about his portrayal of women. In an interview with The Times in 1988, Mr. Updike acknowledged the criticism that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” His “only defense,” he said, “would be that it’s in the domesticity, the family, the sexual relations, that women interest me. I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen.”
Yet in trying to address this criticism by creating what he called “active and dynamic” women in “The Witches of Eastwick” and “S,” he may have made things worse. Some reviewers detected behind the author’s apparent respect for these female dynamos more ambivalence than anything else.
Meanwhile, the essays, book reviews, art criticism, reminiscences, introductions, forewords, prefaces, speeches, travel notes, film commentary, prose sketches, ruminations and other occasional jottings poured forth inexhaustibly, as if the experiences of his five senses only became real once recorded on paper.
The novelist Martin Amis sketched Mr. Updike plausibly in a 1991 review of a collection for The Times Book Review: “Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favorite color. No problem — but can they hang on? Mr. Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.”
Nonfiction Works
Over the decades, the assorted nonfiction filled six thick volumes, “Assorted Prose” (1965), “Picked-Up Pieces” (1975), “Hugging the Shore” (1983), “Odd Jobs” (1991), “More Matter” (1999) and “Due Considerations” (2007). The impression they left most indelibly was their author’s vast range in time, space and discipline as a reader, and his deep capacity to understand, appreciate, discriminate, explain and guide. As he once said: “I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight, let alone to sort out one’s honest responses.”
And whatever his flaws as a novelist, his mastery of the short-story form at least for a time continued to grow. Reviewing Mr. Updike’s sixth collection of stories, “Museums and Women and Other Stories” (1972), Anatole Broyard wrote in The Times, “His former preciousness has toughened into precision.” He concluded, “His language, which was once like a cat licking its fur, now stays closer to its subject, has become a means instead of an end in itself.”
Not incidentally, it was in a story collection — his fifth, “Bech: A Book” (1970) — that Mr. Updike created a counter-self living a counter-life in the character Henry Bech. Bech is an unmarried, urban, blocked Jewish writer immersed in the swim of literary celebrity — “a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times,” as Bech himself put it in the third volume devoted to him, “Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel” (1998), which followed “Bech Is Back” (1982).
As Mr. Updike’s opposite, Henry Bech not only entertained his readers in a voice very different from his creator’s — world-weary, full of schmerz and a touch of schmalz — he also undertook certain tasks that Mr. Updike avoided, like attending literary dinners, tsk-tsking over a younger generation’s minimalist prose and maximal tendency to write memoirs, working off grudges, murdering critics and interviewing John Updike for The New York Times Book Review.
Bech even wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that Mr. Updike never did, to the consternation of many Western writers and critics.
By contrasting so sharply with his creator, Henry Bech also defined Mr. Updike more distinctly, particularly his determination to stick to the essentials of his craft. As Mr. Updike told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight:
“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Rabbit at Rest
The best of Updike, the worst of Updike, and why the two are connected.

By Troy Patterson (SLATE)
What superlatives shall we settle on in memorializing John Updike, dead today of lung cancer at age 76? It is possibly true that he was the best Talk of the Town writer The New Yorker will ever have, though saying that feels like a heresy against James Thurber. Was he the dominant novelist-critic of his generation? That's even truer, though Cynthia Ozick turns out dense and mind-expanding essays, whereas Updike was foremost a reviewer with exceptional antennae. To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you'd be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.
Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms. Even his bad writing—and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there's no shortage of it—sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering.
The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes." Nicholson Baker, another scintillating miniaturist, embarked on the memoir/homage U and I despite not having read even half of Updike's books. Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?
It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known. David Foster Wallace, in a review of Toward the End of Time that sized up Updike as a "phallocrat," counted 10 and half pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts about his penis, and that cannot be a record. Anyone with the stamina to get through Brazil, a beachy retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, will discover at least as much space fruitlessly expended on the hero's "yam." Last month, Updike justly earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. He clinched it with a passage in the new Widows of Eastwick that includes—avert your eyes, children—the following sentence: "Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea."
This is a very rare kind of dreck, the sort that can be secreted only by a brilliant professor of desire, and it cannot be separated from the masterly understanding of lust and physical love Updike displays everywhere from Couples to "A&P" to a review of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect. One of this magician's very best tricks was to address this problem in the stories gathered in The Complete Henry Bech. There, in a collection starring a priapic novelist who was Updike's counter-ego, the author's exquisite mind reconciles itself with the farce of the flesh. The voice is not quite like anything else in Updike's expansive oeuvre, and the reader feels himself safe in the hands of the funniest writer never to make a career of comedy.Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

From The Sunday Times
Our best hope is that Barack Obama can resist the rabble-rousers
Minette Marrin
Life is blighted by the tyranny of the urgent over the important, as someone said. That is why, at the time of Barack Obama’s global triumph in Washington, I wasn’t watching the proceedings live on television but dealing with some urgent minor errands. It was very annoying, particularly when someone asked me why I wasn’t sitting enraptured in front of a television somewhere. Without thinking I replied that it wasn’t really important anyway: I was sick and tired of all the hoopla. Then I realised I wasn’t just being irritable: I really meant it.
I don’t mean that I am sick and tired of Obama. On the day when he was elected as the future president – more than 11 weeks ago now – I felt just as much joy as many millions of other people. The happiness of that moment hasn’t faded, nor has the reminder that politics can occasionally throw up someone who appears to be truly inspiring.
What has changed is that the public good feeling has, one way and another, been whipped up, day after day, into an excess of feeling. Excessive emotion, particularly the inflated emotion of the crowd, is something that should always be distrusted, especially in politics; there are plenty of sombre historical reasons for such misgivings.
By the time Obama’s inauguration day had finally arrived, these feelings had in many places reached a pitch that was almost hysterical. Quite apart from the razzmatazz all over the United States, people in this country had been behaving for days as if we were about to witness the second coming.
The hysteria was particularly marked among journalists and commentators, who were gripped by Obama mania. Those who couldn’t actually persuade their bosses to send them to Washington wrote think pieces in the tones of humble acolytes in a sect.
Those who did get to America seemed to think the British public really needed to be exposed to hour upon hour of excited, repeated, boring, trivial detail; it was almost pathological. And squillions watched. At the same time as losing their hearts to Obama, masses of people seemed to be losing their heads. The media have played an enormous part in this; it is dangerous.
It is true that some people have publicly and privately pointed out that Obama, however remarkable, cannot walk on water and it is a mistake to encourage any expectation that he can. But that hasn’t stopped the hyperinflation of mass expectation and mass feeling, both over there and over here. There seems to be in the darker recesses of the human pysche a constant yearning for hero worship.
No ordinary mortal, however exceptional, can meet the requirements that mass adulation makes of a hero, and when he hesitates or fails, the risk is that the masses will turn to equally irrational extremes of anger and disappointment. Such worship is likely to turn a person’s head, too, and tempt him to imagine that perhaps he might walk on water and should be treated accordingly.
If anyone can resist – and perhaps restrain – such mass adulation, it is probably Obama. No blame attaches to him, I believe. His inauguration speech struck me as a heroic model of self-restraint. Although Obama can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and has given speeches of heart-stopping, almost classical rhetoric on the campaign trail, he chose not to use his power. At such a tempting moment for a great orator, he chose not to stir up the passionate feelings that it needed only a touch of his honeyed voice to arouse. Instead he spoke gravely of the power that lies in humility and restraint. In the context it was positively un-American and it was wholly admirable. It was exactly the corrective tone of voice that was needed, which a lesser man might not have been selfless enough to use.
Imagine, to suggest a ridiculous comparison, what a man like Tony Blair would have made of such a moment. He would have taken off into the ether on the wings of mindless poesy. I’ve always thought that what went wrong with Blair was his seduction by American presidential glamour, by the machismo of the motorcade, the great power of all that mass attention. I think that as soon as he got to Bill Clinton’s Washington, the unsophisticated boy from Islington was corrupted by the thrill of outriders, snipers and surround-sound imperial razzle-dazzle on a world stage; it turned his head, with results that we now know.
There is a great tradition in British thought, to which Obama is heir, just as he is heir to the disciplined classical rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, of not saying more than you mean. One of the most famous expressions of this restraint was given by Shakespeare to Cordelia in King Lear. When her vainglorious father demands to know how much she loves him, she will say no more than is strictly true: she will not exaggerate to advance her own interests.
“According to my bond, no more no less,” she says. Her sisters make overblown protestations, but betray him. Cordelia remains quietly loyal. This is the honourable tradition to which Obama seems to belong.
The opposite tradition, which informs so much of the media and politics, is excess – an excess of exclaiming, promising, demanding, mythologising, misunderstanding, mindless gabby ignorance and general emotional incontinence. Look on the blogosphere – Obama has been subjected to all this in unprecedented volume.
The new president faces problems at home and abroad that may well be insoluble. He is very inexperienced and most of us know little about him. Historically speaking, few individuals make a difference for the better, yet individuals in power can and do constantly make terrible mistakes for the worse. Whatever Obama’s virtues, the truth is that no president could possibly be sure what to do about the global financial crisis.
Even the wisdom of Solomon could not decide what Washington could or should do about Gaza, or Afghanistan, or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, or North Korea’s, or world poverty, or domestic debt, or drugs, or the American poor. And even if anyone knew what should be done, it might still be impossible to do very much. The almost religious expectations laid upon Obama will necessarily be disappointed.
That is why the hysterical hoopla that has built them up is indeed important, because it is dangerous. We’ve had the circuses, the masses will soon say. Now we want the bread. And what will happen to the emperor who cannot provide it?
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Obama pricks America's bubble of denial
Refreshingly, the new President is the first in a long time to address his fellow citizens as adults
Naomi Wolf London Times
Amazingly Barack Obama spoke to us in his first moments as President as if both he and we were adults. His speech stated clearly that we were in a crisis - a deep and serious one - that we had to face it and that, in some ways, had brought it upon ourselves.
Why should this be so surprising and refreshing? Because Mr Obama is piercing a bubble. Since the Reagan years, US presidents have spoken to the nation in “denial-ese”: it's morning in America, we are the light unto the nations, bring it on. For 30 years, we Americans have not only become used to this drug-like rhetoric that blurs our perceptions, we have become addicted to the worldview it represents.
Reinforced by a stream of images of cheery models engaged in consumption and leisure, we shuttle from workstation to mall, increasingly insulated by a media consensus that leaves out the rest of the world and plenty of tough reality inside our borders. We have had a land of denial built around ourselves: all is well in the US, the best of all possible worlds.
This language costs us the capacity to self-correct. If we can't see ourselves as anything but 300 million Gary Coopers and Doris Days, we can't possibly notice the burnt bodies of children in Gaza, dead from our own foreign policies. If our intentions are always honourable, everyone who hates America must be a fanatical raghead. If our individual pluck and ingenuity will just, gosh, win the day, it is difficult to address crises such as the death of our manufacturing base.
This delusional self-image is finally catching up with us. If reality breaks through, painful though it may be, a good deal of benefit may come.
Mr Obama's sober realism was striking because of the extent to which Americans are in denial. In London two weeks ago I was amazed to hear of mainstream TV shows that addressed Americans who had lost their jobs and homes. Such shows are not made in the US. Yes, there is abstract analysis of unemployment and foreclosures, but it is devoid of emotional content. You almost never see a US news story following the tens and now hundreds of thousands who have slid, through no fault of their own, from middle-income lives to near-destitution.
We know a grave recession is on: but it is treated as a “how to consume more creatively” story - a New York Times feature on people asking their concierges to arrange catered dinners for 20 at home, rather than setting them up at high-end restaurants - or the crisis is individualised as a manifestation of personal failure: Dr Phil telling a couple losing their home that it was the fault of their own budgeting.
The American mythology that anyone can do anything, given hard work and personal qualities, means that we can be optimistic and open at our best, with more social mobility than Europe. But it also presupposes that there is no such thing as a system outside the individual, one that can collapse. So when collapse happens, we understand it only in terms of emotional cues: “greedy bankers”, “careless spenders”.
The bubble of denial blocks out foreign policy reality too. Reading the US papers, one would have the sense that the Gaza conflict was an even-handed struggle. We saw images of bodies from afar, but not an actual bloodied child. In England I found, on every cover of almost every news publication, close-up images of wounded children- just as we never see a graphic image of a US soldier wounded or dead in Afghanistan or Iraq. Just as we don't see body bags.
And a single sentence in The New York Times mentioned “protests in Europe” about Gaza. Not until I surfaced in the UK did I have any idea that there were hundreds of thousands of citizens on the streets throughout Europe. Back home, I asked well-informed friends if the knew that thousands had been protesting about Gaza in Europe,
Blank looks all around, followed by a flash of fear. We are starting to realise that we are the kid who is been kept in the dark about some important development that most people know about. One can feel the culture, conversation itself, growing thin from this screening-out of reality. Mr Obama was telling us to snap out of it. And we are, for the most part, relieved. It is like when you know something is terribly wrong but refuse to see a doctor and finally someone drags you to an appointment. It is tough, but salutary.
Mr Obama has studied history carefully. He knows that the great Americans did not coddle their fellow citizens, or flatter them. The great Americans told their fellow citizens to get a grip and look in the mirror.
Mr Obama cites Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, an incredible piece of rhetoric. At the peak of a bloody civil war, Lincoln did not say the equivalent of “mission accomplished”. He said that we were in the middle of a bloody civil war. That there was more suffering ahead. That soldiers were dying. And then he said that America had brought the conflict upon herself through the spiritual violation represented by the enslavement of fellow Americans - and that not a drop of blood or an ounce of treasure would be spared until it was expiated.
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy also called on Americans to confront where they had strayed from their national mandate to be a “light unto the nations”. American histories tend to misrepresent the dark language these leaders used, as if our now-saccharine consciousness can't bear the truth of the past, let alone of the present. Can you imagine a US president speaking like that today? Well, you just heard one, gently enough, begin to do so.
The relief that many Americans feel after just one dose of reality means that not only can we bear it - many of us sense it is long overdue. Our hearts will no doubt be broken by this very President many times over. But for now he has done us a great favour: let in a bit of the real darkness of what we face. It is up to us to be willing to step out of the bubble.
Naomi Wolf is co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign. Her books include The End of America and Give Me Liberty

"This Winter of Our Hardship"
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land—a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America— they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions—that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions—who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account—to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day—because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control—and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort—even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West—know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment—a moment that will define a generation—it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence—the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed—why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

From The Sunday Times
Can Barack Obama fix it? Yes he can
In two days’ time, Barack Obama will be president of the United States. His election promises a break with the failures of the Bush years but what does he really stand for? Andrew Sullivan examines his likely domestic and foreign policies and weighs their chances of success
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Magnanimity in victory: that was Churchill’s advice. And since his precocious victory last November, Barack Obama has walked that Churchillian walk. It is not common in politics, especially after a meteoric rise past every prejudice, every smear and every Clinton, but Obama has an old soul’s perspective and an intellectually secure man’s confidence. Perhaps he has too much confidence — except that every time his friends feared that in the campaign, he proved them wrong.
From the shallow brittleness of George W Bush to the supple strength of Obama is a revolution in temperament and style not seen since Jimmy Carter gave way to Ronald Reagan 28 years ago. It signals the kind of administration that now looms before us: a conciliatory, inclusive, pragmatic form of liberalism. It’s a liberalism eager to learn from the insights of conservatives, and it is pioneered by a president-elect shrewd enough to know that generosity of spirit means more leverage and influence, not less.
The goal, it now seems clear, is what some deduced many months ago: Obama wants to become the leader of an American version of the national governments that Britain relied on in the depths of the last Great Depression.
We cannot know whether he will succeed, whether partisanship and America’s culture war will slowly eat him up, or whether in government, as he makes decisions with winners and losers, his aura will evaporate. But what we can say is that, so far, he shows every sign of meaning what he said about leaving that divisive, destructive froth behind. Just reading the papers every morning, we see every sign that the gravity of the crisis his predecessor bequeaths him makes this necessary.
The Washington establishment still doesn’t know quite what to make of him. For almost two decades the town has been divided ideologically and culturally — red and blue, neoliberal and neoconservative — shying and plunging in mood swings and feuding. For 16 years, under the guidance of political hatchet men such as Bill Clinton’s Dick Morris and Bush’s Karl Rove, these divisions have been seen as ways to wedge your way to short-term political advantage, to exploit American difference for electoral or PR gain.
The press learnt that cynicism was the only reliable guide to understanding politics and that world-weariness was the same as wisdom. That fear of seeming naive was what inhibited many in the press from greater scepticism about Saddam’s alleged arsenal in the run-up to the Iraq war.
It was an emotionally familiar and comfortable rut. The baby-boomer generation, reared and suckled on post-Vietnam divides, staged their battles like bitter spouses after years of a failed marriage who never really planned on divorce. Now, with this first post-boomer politician, the children who witnessed their parents’ endless fighting have taken over. And it’s the children who seem like adults.
Take a few largely symbolic things that Obama has done since November 4. He gave his chief rival and fierce competitor, Hillary Clinton, the biggest job in his government. He reached out to John McCain, his opponent in the autumn campaign, and will hold a dinner in McCain’s honour soon. He asked a powerful evangelical voice, Rick Warren, to give the inaugural invocation.
Last week he dined with a group of Republican columnists who endorsed his opponent. The dinner was at the home of George Will, the closest America gets to a Tory mind. He did this before he talked to any journalists who had actually supported him. At the Pentagon, Obama has asked Bush’s appointee, Robert Gates, to stay on. He asked Mark Dybul, Bush’s only openly gay appointee, to remain as global Aids co-ordinator. This is not Karl Rove’s America. In so many ways, it symbolises its undoing.
Obama acts like a kind of antacid to the American stomach. He has walked through the churn of racial and cultural and religious polarisation and somehow calmed everyone down.
Last spring he faced his biggest crisis — the exploitation by the Republican right of his incendiary former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a man whose penchant for polarisation was pathological. At a moment of extreme emotion and political peril, Obama found a way to give a speech that remains the greatest of recent times, to remind Americans of their complex and painful racial past, and not to condescend or cavil. The intellectual achievement of the speech was impressive enough — sufficient to provoke Garry Wills, the Lincoln scholar, to compare it to the Gettysburg address. That Obama wrote and delivered it as he heard in his ears every racial stereotype that had pummelled his psyche for his entire life bespoke an emotional maturity that still shocks.
He even managed — and this was a real achievement — to suck the drama out of the Clintons, to defeat them by quietly and methodically reducing their oxygen supply until they had no option but to surrender. Then he gave them their own night at the convention, a concession that many viewed as weakness but that only strengthened him. In the autumn he never took the Sarah Palin bait, treating her as one might handle the proverbial nutter on the bus even as she accused him of being a terrorist-loving socialist and whipped up largely white, southern crowds with paranoid fervour.
Maybe it’s Michelle Obama who vents everything privately that her husband seems to absorb publicly. Or maybe he just came that way. But there is something real about this quality that is not simply a projection of so many hopes. At several points in the gut-wrenching emotional rollercoaster of last year he simply disappeared alone into a hotel room for a few minutes to gather his thoughts and restrain his feelings. It was this emotional balance and temperamental maturity that led many to see him as a president long before it ever became feasible or even imaginable.
He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to his humour, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league. But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp of policy.
What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.
He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart enough to say yes.
He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party.
He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.
This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come, as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually more than just a marketing device for a campaign.
Take the economy. Obama’s immediate and most pressing crisis is a global economy teetering on the edge. It is also a resilient banking crisis in the US that has yet to resolve itself and a collapse in demand that threatens to turn a recession into something much darker. Worse, the current budget outlook would make even Bush Republicans blanch — trillions in deficits as far as the eye can see and a record national debt (outside the second world war).
The sheer extent of the damage that the outgoing president has done to American and global financial balance is hard to overstate. He spent like a trust-fund baby who would never have to balance the books or earn a living. He made the entitlement crisis worse by adding a massive new healthcare programme for the elderly in a naked attempt to win Florida for ever. Because of an ideological insistence on partial privatisation, desperately needed reform of social security ended in miserable failure. Trillions of dollars were poured into a war against Iraq waged on the basis of a WMD threat that didn’t exist.
Obama’s response has been to turn not to ideologues but to the smartest economic team he could find. His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, was integral to the Bush administration’s response to the crisis; no one doubts that Larry Summers, incoming head of the National Economic Council, is one of the sharpest economic minds on the planet.
The policy, or what we are beginning to glimpse of it, is just as bipartisan. There will be a big increase in infrastructure projects, aimed at maximal impact on growth. But there will also be tax cuts for the middle class and a bevy of Republican-friendly business tax breaks to maximise the boost to demand. The tax hikes for the very wealthy — the only real economic difference between Obama and McCain last autumn — will not happen. No one wants to suck any money out of the spending economy right now for any reason.
The most striking news of the past week is a strong indication that Obama will unveil a very tough spending budget, will tackle new financial regulations early and will put real reform of the entitlement state on the table. In some ways, he has no choice. Given America’s current level of public and private debt, the president-elect cannot borrow another few trillion in a few years without reassuring global markets that there is a long-term prospect for American fiscal balance.
Obama knows that defence, healthcare and retirement benefits are where the money is. His proposed fiscal responsibility summit may drift into the usual irrelevance, but perhaps the depth of the long-term problems could provide an opening to address the longer-term insolvency of the American state. So grapple with that: a black urban Democrat is pledging to be far more fiscally responsible than a Texas Republican.
In foreign policy, the same pragmatism abounds. Although withdrawal of troops from Iraq will occur, Obama knows all too well that the current lull in sectarian violence is extremely fragile and that the power vacuum left by withdrawal could spark a new civil or regional war. So expect some foot-dragging.
On Afghanistan, the president-elect is too shrewd to raise the kind of utopian expectations of democracy invoked so glibly by Bush. He plans to increase troop levels there but is reconciled to the fact that the best that can be hoped for is prevention or eradication of terrorist training camps that could directly hurt Americans.
On detention, interrogation and rendition, Obama has also been hemmed in by the Bush legacy. On torture, Obama is clear enough. The appointment of a heavyweight enemy of torture, Leon Panetta, to the CIA, and of a civil libertarian, Dawn Johnsen, in the critical role as head of the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel, is as blunt a signal as any new president could send that the days of Bush and Dick Cheney are over. Among Obama’s first moves will be an executive order closing the torture and detention camp at Guantanamo.
However, returning to the community of civilised nations in interrogation techniques does not and cannot resolve the intractable legal problems created by Cheney. Obama will simply have to tackle these on a case-by-case basis, with unavoidably unsatisfying results.
Many Guantanamo detainees can be repatriated — the Yemenis alone cut the numbers in half. Many others have already been released for lack of evidence. But there will be scores of prisoners who are doubtless dangerous and yet were tortured for so long and so unequivocally by the US that all the evidence against them would be thrown out in any non-kangaroo courts (which excludes Bush’s rigged “military commissions”).
Last week Bush’s own appointee as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo conceded that torture had made prosecutions of many prisoners impossible. And this, of course, is the real fruit of the Cheney madness: the worst of the worst will either get off free or will remain a public relations black eye to the US for ever.
Obama also understands that restoring America’s moral standing on the torture question could actually give the US government a little more leeway on detention and rendition. If the world knows that maltreatment won’t happen, some sane, constitutional and legal provisions for detention without charge could be constructed on the British model. The rationale is not torturing for “intelligence” but protecting the public while evidence is searched for and doubt remains. Equally, some kind of rendition programme that follows the lines of Bill Clinton and the first President Bush — and that eschews any co-operation with regimes that torture — is a reasonable tool in the war against jihadist terror. It’s the Bush-Cheney innovation of “extraordinary renditions” and disappearances that has to end.
Will there be prosecutions for war crimes? Obama will not embrace that as a programme. But he is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and a teacher of constitutional law. If evidence of war crimes emerges, he will not prevent his attorney-general from prosecuting, as he must. The law grinds on — and as the Bush torture era recedes, my bet is that it will grind rather relentlessly.
What concerns Obama most of all is the Bush assertion of inherent constitutional powers to designate any human being — citizen or non-citizen, in America or anywhere else — as an “enemy combatant” and to detain them indefinitely without trial and torture them at will. This, the president-elect fully understands, is in effect the abolition of the constitution. He will take an oath on Tuesday to protect that constitution, not eviscerate it in the tradition of his predecessor.
On Israel, perhaps, we will see the biggest shift. Obama has so far been preternaturally silent on the Gaza bombardment, in deference to the “one president at a time” mantra and because he knows full well that if he were not about to become president, the Israelis would not have launched their attack.
Obama does not want to get into a war of words with Israel before he even takes office, but he shows every sign of tackling the Middle East the way he has defused America’s culture wars. He will try to prick the passion and lay out a rational solution.
We all know the contours of the deal that the Israelis and the Palestinians are too politically divided and weak to agree to: a two-state compromise, a roll-back of settlements, an international force on the border with the West Bank, a cessation of terrorism, and financial compensation for displaced Palestinians seeking a right of return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
My sense is that Clinton, the secretary of state, shares Obama’s views and that her reflexively neoconservative approach to Israel will moderate once she is no longer a senator from New York. My sense is also that Obama intends to use Clinton in ways not seen in a secretary of state for a very long time. And my guess is that she would not have taken the job if she were not convinced that she has a chance to go down in history as an architect of a breakthrough Middle East peace agreement.
Still, if any fight could remain totally immune to Obama’s moderation, it is surely the Israeli-Palestinian death match. Does this product of Hawaiian hippiedom really think he can get through to Hamas? Or Benjamin Netanyahu?
I don’t think Obama has many illusions on this score, but he will almost certainly try to change the game with a very public and early appeal to the world’s Muslims. He will take the oath of office using his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and will likely give a big speech soon that may give his domestic advisers heartburn. His face remains one of America’s most potent weapons in the war of ideas that is integral to winning the fight against jihadist terrorism. What he is looking for is a grand bargain in the Middle East just as surely as he is seeking a grand bargain in domestic fiscal matters. Both bargains would be made possible by grave and growing crises that help to scramble the recent past, by an overarching rhetorical appeal to the masses behind the political leaders and by a bit of good luck and planning.
Be assured that Obama is more of a strategist than a tactician. He knows that all the regional conflicts are interlocked and is often a few steps ahead of his enemies (just ask Clinton or McCain). To move Israel forward, he needs to engage Syria. To deal with Gaza, he has to test the waters with Iran. To achieve minimalist goals in Afghanistan, he needs Pakistan.
When you listen to him rattle off all the dimensions of the broader conflict, you are aware that this is a president who does not see the world in black and white or in with-us-or-against-us terms. He sees it as a series of interconnected conflicts that can be managed by pragmatic solutions, combined with a little rhetorical fairy dust and willingness to offer respect where Bush provided merely contempt. This is not a panacea. But it is not nothing either.
Obama almost certainly believes, for example, that no one is enjoying the Gaza disaster more than Iran’s government, and that Tehran’s more radical mullahs fear nothing more than fighting an election at home while Obama appeals to the Iranian people over their heads. It is perfectly reasonable to be confident that Obama threatens President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in ways that Bush never managed. I can hope, at least.
If you close your eyes and imagine what this combination of fiscal and foreign policy realism portends, you will come to a pretty obvious conclusion. This Democratic liberal is actually, when it comes down to it, a man almost entirely within the mainstream spectrum of the European centre right. Imagine a Cameron-style Tory becoming president of the United States and try to come up with something he would do differently.
This blend of pragmatism and realism reminds me in the American context of Eisenhower more than any other recent president. Obama has the unerring instincts of a conciliator and a moderate Tory. But he has the rhetorical skills of a Kennedy or a Churchill. That’s a potent combination.
It may be, of course, that the relief at the end of the Bush era is colouring our hopes. It may also be that events conspire to derail the man, or that the habits of the past two decades in Washington will return with a vengeance and do to Obama what was done to Clinton, another centrist Democrat who came to office on a tide of goodwill. But I don’t think that, given the immense crises we all face, it is unreasonable to hope for more.
There is something about Obama’s willingness to give others credit, to approach so many issues with such dispassionate pragmatism, and to shift by symbols and speeches the mood and tenor of an entire country that gives one a modest form of optimism. Even now, as the outlook seems so dark, and as the inheritance seems so insuperable, three words linger in the mind.
Yes, he can.
And two words echo back at me.
Can we?

Matt Ridley

Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts
Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a ‘bottom-up’ place. On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before.
Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say, while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered, little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodelled by early and continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not top-down dirigisme. Faithful reproduction, occasional random variation and selective survival can be a surprisingly progressive and cumulative force: it can gradually build things of immense complexity. Indeed, it can make something far more complex than a conscious, deliberate designer ever could: with apologies to William Paley and Richard Dawkins, it can make a watchmaker.
Ideas evolve by descent with modification, just as bodies do, and Darwin at least partly got this idea from economists, who got it from empirical philosophers. Locke and Newton begat Hume and Voltaire who begat Hutcheson and Smith who begat Malthus and Ricardo who begat Darwin and Wallace. Before Darwin, the supreme example of an undesigned system was Adam Smith’s economy, spontaneously self-ordered through the actions of individuals, rather than ordained by a monarch or a parliament. Where Darwin defenestrated God, Smith had defenestrated government. Neatly, this year also sees a Smith anniversary, the 250th birthday of his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that is very Darwinian in its insistence that sympathy is what we would today call innate, that people are naturally nice as well as naturally nasty.
Darwin’s debt to the political economists is considerable. In his last year at Cambridge in 1829, he reported in a letter, ‘My studies consist in Adam Smith and Locke’. At Maer, his uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s house in Staffordshire, he often met the lawyer and laissez-faire politician Sir James Mackintosh (whose daughter married Darwin’s brother-in-law and had an affair with his brother). On the Beagle, he read the naturalist Henri Milne-Edwards, who took Adam Smith’s notion of the division of labour and applied it to the organs of the body. Darwin promptly re-applied it to the division of labour among specialised species in an ecosystem: ‘The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body — a subject so well elucidated by Milne-Edwards.’
Today, generally, Adam Smith is claimed by the Right, Darwin by the Left. In the American South and Midwest, where Smith’s individualist, libertarian, small-government philosophy is all the rage, Darwin is reviled for his contradiction of creation. Yet if the market needs no central planner, why should life need an intelligent designer? Conversely, in the average European biol- ogy laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralised properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.
So long is the shadow cast by the determinism of Karl Marx that it is often forgotten how radical the economic liberalism of the political economists seemed in the 1830s, the decade when Darwin’s thinking crystallised. This is well illustrated by the case of Harriet Martineau, who had a small but seminal influence on Darwin. The daughter of a Norwich cotton manufacturer ruined by a bank crash in the 1820s, Martineau lived by her pen. She was a radical, outspoken feminist, who toured America bravely inveighing against slavery and became so notorious that there were plans to lynch her in South Carolina. Yet before that, she had shot to fame with a series of short fictional books called Illustrations of Political Economy, which were intended to educate people in the free-trade, free-market ideas of Adam Smith (‘whose excellence is marvellous’, she said), David Ricardo and Robert Malthus, and in particular to persuade the working classes that their interests were congruent with those of their employers.
Martineau’s Illustrations were written while Darwin was on HMS Beagle. After she returned from America she became a very close friend of his elder brother Erasmus, who saw her almost daily in the late 1830s. Erasmus introduced Harriet to Charles, who was soon hanging on her every word. Had he not been ‘astonished to find how ugly she is’, Charles might have justified his father’s worry that one of his sons would marry her (as it was, cautious Charles preferred his god-fearing mouse of a cousin Emma Wedgwood to this free-thinking literary lioness). Undoubtedly they discussed slavery, which had horrified Darwin in Brazil. But since Martineau had been a close confidante of Malthus — despite his speech impediment and her deafness — there is little doubt that they also talked political economy. Was it a coincidence that Darwin read Malthus, probably not for the first time, in October 1838, just as he was looking for a mechanism to explain evolution?
Malthus taught Darwin the bleak lesson that overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence — and hence gave him the insight that in a struggle for existence, survival could be selective. But the notion that, with random variation, this selective survival could then generate complexity and sophistication where there had been none before, that it is a cumulative and creative force, is entirely his. It is also one that applies to more than the bodies of living beings.
Technology is a case in point. Although engineers are under the fond illusion that they design things, nearly all of what they do consists of nudging forward descent with modification. Every technology has traceable ancestry; ‘to create is to recombine’ said the geneticist François Jacob. The first motor car was once described by the historian L.T.C. Rolt as ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. Just like living systems, technologies experience mutation (such as the invention of the spinning jenny), reproduction (the rapid mechanisation of the cotton industry as manufacturers copied each others’ machines), sex (Samuel Crompton’s combination of water frame and jenny to make a ‘mule’), competition (different designs competing in the early cotton mills), extinction (the spinning jenny was obsolete by 1800), and increasing complexity (modern cotton mills are electrified and computerised).
Technology also experiences progress and ‘arms races’ between competitors. Just as a modern horse could outrun a Mesohippus three-toed horse from 30 million years ago, so a car can outrun a horse-drawn carriage. Yet horses can only just go fast enough to escape today’s lions, and Land Rovers can only just perform well enough to maintain market share against Toyotas. Such running to stay in the same (improving) place is known to biologists as a Red Queen process after the character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
Software inventors have learnt to recognise the power of trial and error rather than deliberate design. Beginning with ‘genetic algorithms’ in the 1980s, they designed programmes that would experiment with changes in their sequence till they solved the problem set for them. Then gradually the open-source software movement emerged by which users themselves altered programmes and shared their improvements with each other. Linux and Apache are operating systems designed by such democratic methods, but the practice has long spread beyond programmers. Wikipedia is a bottom-up knowledge repository and, though far from flawless, is proving easily capable, even in its first flush of youth, of matching expert-written encyclopaedias for accuracy and reach. It grows by natural selection among edits.
The internet is an increasingly Darwinian place, where decentralised, self-organising sophistication holds sway: swarm intelligence is the fashionable term. Trey Ratcliff, founder of a computer games company in Texas, tells me he feels more like a victim than a designer of technology’s evolution: ‘saying Edison invented the phonograph is like saying a spider invented silk’.
The supreme example of bottom-up, rather than top-down, complexity is the market itself. As the economist Paul Seabright has written, the almost miraculous system by which he can go out and buy a cotton shirt on a whim — and expect the cotton grower, the weaver, the shirtmaker, the shipper and the retailer to have got it ready for him just when he enters the shop — is not planned or designed, it evolves. The top-down alternative does not have a great track record. Can you doubt that if the shirt industry was run by a National Shirt Service, there would now be queues, quotas and shortages?
Dirigisme has a place, of course, in the regulation and operation if not the design of institutions. A school cannot work without a teacher, a firm without a manager, or an army without a general — just as a body is directed by a brain in its everyday operations. But hubristic human beings tend to exaggerate the degree to which they are in charge of, rather than at the mercy of, organisations.
The dark side of bottom-up Darwinism is that cumulative complexity can come about only through selective death or selective celibacy. Wonderful life may result, but it is born red in tooth and claw. The social Darwinists of the 19th century and the eugenicists of the 20th were of the view that the strong should therefore be encouraged to succeed, the better to keep natural selection going. But this is to misread human society. The human body may have come about through three billion years of natural selection among genes, but civilisation and prosperity came from 50,000 years of much more rapid natural selection among ideas. It is easily possible to blunt genetic selection in the name of kindness, while allowing cultural selection to continue: the death of an idea need not be cruel.
There is, however, one more disturbing and topical parallel between biological and cultural evolution. Just as natural selection’s constructive capacity did not prevent mass extinctions, one of which, 251 million years ago, eradicated over 96 per cent of marine species, so the market’s ability to build order cannot prevent crashes. Even sophisticated, entropy-defying complex systems are subject to the weather-like vagaries of mathematical chaos — and there Darwin cannot help.
©2007 by The Spectator (1828) Ltd. All Rights Reserved

The frat boy ships out
From The Economist print edition
Few people will mourn the departure of the 43rd president
HE LEAVES the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.
America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”.
Few people would have predicted this litany of disasters when Mr Bush ran for the presidency in 2000. True, the 2000 election was likely to be divisive because of the peculiar arithmetic of the outcome (Mr Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 500,000 votes, then won a disputed recount in Florida by a few hundred). But for most people Mr Bush was a pretty acceptable choice, and certainly not a crusader-in-waiting.
He came across as an affable chap, particularly when compared with his uptight rival. Frank Bruni, who covered his election campaign for the New York Times, wrote in 2002 that “the Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster.” And the then governor of Texas presented himself as a centrist—a new kind of “compassionate conservative”, a “uniter rather than a divider”, an advocate of a “humble” and restrained foreign policy. The Economist liked this mixture enough to endorse him in 2000.
How did all this change? How did the uniter become a divider? How did Mr Bush’s governing style shape American politics over the next eight years? And what legacy has the 43rd president left for the 44th?
His supporters—the few that remain—point out that this was a presidency knocked sideways by the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, which no one foresaw. The huge expansion of government and executive power under Mr Bush, and the prosecution of a disastrous war, all unrolled in the wake of those attacks. The financial crisis, which began with overvalued homes and sloppily underwritten mortgages, was the product of numerous forces and failures in which Mr Bush was not a major contributor; they included low interest rates, bankers’ reckless risk-taking, flawed regulation and consumers’ bubble mentality, all of which spanned borders.
Yet Mr Bush’s presidency was also poisoned by his own ambition. Mr Bruni’s “timeless fraternity boy” wanted to be a great president. He not only wanted to win the second term that Bill Clinton had denied to his father—though that mattered to him enormously. He also wanted to usher in a period of prolonged Republican hegemony, much as William McKinley had done for his party in the late 19th century. After the September 11th attacks he not only itched to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He also wanted to tackle the root causes of terrorism in the Middle East. Mr Bush frequently spoke about how much he hated anything that was “small ball”. His close advisers repeatedly described him as a “transformative president”.
Mr Bush’s role model throughout his presidency was not his father but the patron saint of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan. He regarded Reagan as a man who had unleashed free-enterprise and defeated the Soviet Empire, and he tried to do the same with his huge tax cuts and his global war on terror. He mimicked Reagan’s Western style, even relaxing on a Texas ranch where Reagan had taken his holidays on a Californian one; and he echoed Reagan’s enthusiastic use of the word “evil”.
Other facets of Mr Bush’s personality mixed with his vaulting ambition to undermine his presidency. Mr Bush is what the British call an inverted snob. A scion of one of America’s most powerful families, he is a devotee of sunbelt populism; a product of Yale and Harvard Business School, he is a scourge of eggheads. Mr Bush is a convert to an evangelical Christianity that emphasises emotion—particularly the intensely emotional experience of being born again—over ratiocination. He also styled himself, much like Reagan, as a decider rather than a details man; many people who met him were astonished by what they described as his “lack of inquisitiveness” and his general “passivity”.
This led Mr Bush to distrust the Washington establishment, and even to believe that establishment wisdom was probably wrong simply by virtue of what it was. Fred Barnes, a conservative journalist, entitled his book on Mr Bush “Rebel in Chief”. He quotes one Bush confidante as saying: “One tux a term. That’s our idea of outreach to the Washington community.”
Lack of curiosity also led Mr Bush to suspect intellectuals in general and academic experts in particular. David Frum, who wrote speeches for Mr Bush during his first term, noted that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House”. The Bush cabinet was “solid and reliable”, but contained no “really high-powered brains”. Karen Hughes, one of his closest advisers, “rarely read books and distrusted people who did”. Ron Suskind, a journalist, has argued that Mr Bush created a “faith-based presidency” in which decisions, precisely because they were based on faith, could not be revised subsequently.
For the good of the party
Mr Bush relied heavily on a small inner core of advisers. The most important of these was Dick Cheney, who quickly became the most powerful vice-president in American history. Mr Cheney used his mastery of bureaucracy to fill the administration with his protégés and to control the flow of information to the president. He pushed Mr Bush forcefully to the right on everything from global warming to the invasion of Iraq; he also fought ruthlessly to expand the power of the executive branch, which he thought had been dangerously restricted since Watergate.
The two other decisive figures were Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s longtime political guru, and Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary. Mr Rove was obsessed by pursuing his dream of a rolling Republican realignment, subordinating everything to party politics. Mr Rumsfeld regarded the Iraq war not, like his boss, as an exercise in democracy-building, but as an opportunity to test the model of an “agile military” that he was pioneering at the Pentagon.
The fruit of all this can be seen in the three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence. Mr Bush was the most partisan president in living memory. He was content to be president of half the country—a leader who fused his roles of head of state and leader of his party. He devoted his presidency to feeding the Republican coalition that elected him.
The most important legislation of his first year in office was a $1.35 trillion tax cut that handed an extra $53,000 to the top 1% of earners. At his farewell press conference on January 12th Mr Bush called his tax cuts the “right course of action”, as if they were an unpopular but heroic decision. They weren’t. The budget was in surplus in 2000, and both Mr Bush’s main Republican rival, John McCain, and his Democratic opponent, Mr Gore, also wanted to cut taxes, but by less, so as to pay down more debt and shore up Social Security (public pensions). Mr Bush’s much larger tax cut reflected his, and his party’s, belief that lower taxes restrain the size of government, empower individuals and are good for both growth and Republican prospects.

Mr Bush sold his first tax cut, in 2001, as recession insurance. He did the same in 2003; and though the budget surplus was gone by then, he upped the ante by also lowering taxes on capital gains and dividends. Lower taxes on capital boost investment, but, as one former senior administration official says, that thought was secondary: “It was a political winner that happened to coincide with good economics.” Lower taxes on capital had the potential to bolster a growing “investor class” that tended to vote Republican.
Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.
Bumbling towards Baghdad
The Iraq war was a case study of what happens when politicisation is mixed with incompetence. A long-standing convention holds that politics stops at the ocean’s edge. But Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats “Defeaticrats” whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror.
Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, remarks how unusual it is for a president to have politicised such a national catastrophe: “No other president—Lincoln in the civil war, FDR in world war two, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the cold war—faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances, failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonised the Democrats.”
The invasion of Iraq was like much else in the Bush years—an initial triumph that contained the seeds of disaster. Thomas Ricks, the author of “Fiasco”, argues that “the US-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation.” Mr Rumsfeld’s decision to invade with too few troops led inexorably to the breakdown of law and order, which turned the Iraqi population against the Americans, and to the Abu Ghraib scandal, which solidified world opinion against America. But Mr Bush responded to the unfolding disaster with a mixture of denial and stubbornness, refusing to force Mr Rumsfeld to adjust his plans. He engaged in an absurd photo-op to declare “Mission accomplished”, and he also gave medals to three of the architects of the debacle, George Tenet, Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer.
Mr Bush’s weaknesses were on display again in the second great disaster of his administration, Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005. The hurricane exposed Mr Bush’s congenital passivity: he did not visit New Orleans until five days later, after first viewing the damage from the safety of Air Force One. It also exposed the consequences of filling your administration with third-rate hacks. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, a former commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, made a hash of dealing with the disaster but nevertheless received an encomium from the president—“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”—that rang around the country.
The Truman hope
How will Mr Bush be judged in the light of history? “Many historians”, says Princeton’s Mr Wilentz, “are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.” A humbled Mr Bush counters his critics by pointing out that “You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you’re gone.” He frequently invokes the name of Harry Truman as a president who was dismissed at the time, but is now regarded as one of the greats.
Mr Bush’s presidency is not without its merits. He supported sensible immigration reform. He proposed tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the now-nationalised mortagage agencies. Congress stymied him on both points. He promoted more members of minorities than any previous president; and he also stood up to the Dixiecrat wing of his party, edging Trent Lott, a Mississippi senator, out of his job as majority leader for segregation-favouring remarks. He maintained good relations with India, Japan and, particularly, Africa, where he launched a $15 billion anti-AIDS programme.
On trade, too, Mr Bush’s heart was in the right place, though policy was at first subverted by political or strategic priorities. In 2002 he approved tariffs on imported steel to fulfil a promise Mr Cheney made to steelworkers in West Virginia, a state crucial to his 2000 election. That year he also signed a massive increase in farm subsidies so as not to antagonise farm-state congressmen facing election that autumn. But these early protectionist impulses gave way to a more stalwart defence of trade. Mr Bush resisted intense pressure from Congress to punish China for keeping its currency low. After Congress narrowly granted him streamlined authority to negotiate treaties, he pushed the Doha global free-trade agreement and a free-trade area of the Americas. These efforts failed in part because of other countries’ intransigence, notably India’s in the case of the Doha round. In the absence of a broader framework, his administration pursued bilateral trade deals, although often with countries chosen for strategic rather than economic value: Oman and Bahrain, for example, which host American military bases.
His administration’s handling of the financial crisis alternated between shaky and competent. Swallowing his visceral scorn for finance, Mr Bush delegated crisis management to Henry Paulson, his treasury secretary and a former investment banker. Mr Paulson’s remedies were often blunted by complexity, inconsistency and his insistence that lenders and borrowers pay for their mistakes. His decision to let Lehman Brothers fail significantly intensified the crisis. Still, Mr Paulson regrouped by pouring hundreds of billions of government dollars into the tottering financial system, which has bought a measure of stability. Mr Bush backed this, in violation of his own anti-interventionist impulses.
Mr Bush showed more ability to learn from his mistakes than his critics realise or than he himself might like to admit. The second Bush administration was very different from the first. He reached out to America’s allies, particularly through his second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, establishing good relations with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel; and he also improved his administration’s profile in the world by firing Donald Rumsfeld and sidelining various neoconservatives.
The president’s legendary stubbornness paid off in one area: his decision to ignore Washington’s wise men and increase troop levels in Iraq, rather than preparing for withdrawal, probably averted disaster there and certainly increased stability. There is even a possibility that Mr Bush’s most controversial decision may eventually be vindicated: if Iraq turns into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, then he will look much better in a decade’s time than he does today. But that is a big “if”.
Farewell to restraint
Meanwhile, his policy of cutting taxes while increasing spending—of simultaneously pursuing big government and small government—dramatically swelled the deficit. He inherited a projected ten-year surplus of $5.6 trillion and bequeaths a ten-year deficit of $6 trillion, assuming his tax cuts remain in place. Hardly the makings of a positive judgment from future historians.
In pursuit of his fiscal ambitions, Mr Bush helped roll over or sweep aside long-standing rules and conventions designed to keep the deficit in check. Republicans in Congress pushed through his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts under a parliamentary manoeuvre called “reconciliation” previously reserved for measures that reduced, or did not increase, the deficit. Doing so largely stripped Democrats of their ability to raise procedural obstacles in the Senate, but also required the tax cuts to expire after ten years. As the projected surpluses melted away, Mr Bush cut the horizon in his budgets from ten years to five, masking the long-term impact of his policies.
For years the president refused to include the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in his budget. He also acquiesced in the expiry of 12-year-old budget rules that made it difficult to cut taxes or increase spending if it raised the deficit. In coming years deficit reduction will be hard enough, with the recession-induced collapse in tax collections and the cost of the bail-outs. Jim Horney, a former Democratic congressional staffer now at the liberal Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think-tank, says it has been made even harder by the disappearance of any culture of restraint in Congress.
Mr Bush’s biggest failure, however, is on entitlements. The ageing of the population, coupled with rapidly rising health-care costs, means that in coming decades Social Security and Medicare benefits will outstrip workers’ payroll contributions by trillions of dollars. Both programmes presented Mr Bush with a political opportunity. To pry elderly voters away from the Democrats, he promised to add a prescription-drug benefit as part of any Medicare reform. He did so in 2003, winning the support of the AARP, the powerful pensioners’ lobby, which has long been seen as closer to the Democrats. But in the end he achieved few cost savings, while adding a staggering $8 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liability (see chart).
Social Security, founded in the Depression to provide workers with a secure pension, has defied all recent attempts to make it solvent. Although such an attempt was part of Mr Bush’s first election campaign, it was not solvency that animated him, but the prospect of workers diverting some of their Social Security contributions to private investment accounts. Such accounts were intended as the centrepiece of the Republican Party’s “ownership society”.
Economists are divided on the merit of such accounts, but agree they do nothing to restore solvency: that requires slimmer benefits, higher taxes, or both. Because of the political peril of touching Social Security, broad reform demands bipartisan support. Yet David Walker, the federal government’s chief auditor from 1998 to 2008, says Mr Bush doomed his own effort, launched after his 2004 re-election, by seeking to shape its outcome from the start. He had appointed an advisory commission whose members first had to agree to support private accounts (which many Democrats oppose). He issued detailed proposals for private accounts while eschewing, until much later, solvency proposals. His administration staged some 200 “town hall” events attended by pre-screened participants, Mr Walker says, yet at the end of it all support for Mr Bush’s proposal was lower than when it began.
Between the Medicare drug benefit and the failure to restore solvency to Social Security, the long-term unfunded cost of America’s programmes for the elderly had last year reached a stratospheric $43 trillion, or 5% of future wages, compared with $13 trillion, or 3% of future wages, in 2000. Mr Obama and Congress may still be able to mend entitlements. But they start with a bigger and more imminent danger than Mr Bush did eight years ago, and one made even harder by the deep hole the current recession has created in the budget.
The costs of ambition
The neoconservatives who had such influence over Mr Bush argued that unintended consequences were usually more important than the intended ones. The Bush presidency has proved them right in this, if in little else.
A president who laboured to produce Republican hegemony ended up dramatically weakening the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is now in a more powerful position than it has been at any time since the second world war. In the Senate, the Democrats have a majority of 59 seats to 41 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats); in the House, they hold 256 seats to the Republicans’ 178. Americans who came of age during the Bush years identify with the Democrats by the largest majority recorded for any age cohort since the second world war.
A president who believed that America’s global supremacy was guaranteed by America’s unrivalled military power ended up demonstrating the limits of both. Many of America’s closest allies in Europe refused to co-operate with the Iraq war. Many of America’s rivals used America’s travails in Iraq to extend their power: Iran is more powerful than it was in 2000, and closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb; Russia and China have extended their web of alliances and strengthened their regional influence. Mr Bush’s recalibration of his policies in his second term suggests that even he recognises that America’s loss of soft power has cost it dear.
The American military machine is under intense strain. The demands of tackling the Iraq insurgency have forced America to short-change Afghanistan. Deployments have grown longer and redeployments more frequent. Recruitment standards are going down. The neoconservative dream of a muscle-bound America knocking down the “axis of evil” and planting democracies from North Korea to Iran looks, more than ever, like an overheated fantasy cooked up in a think-tank.
Finally, Mr Bush also demonstrated the limits of capitalist triumphalism. The Bush administration was as business-friendly as any in American history: Mr Bush was the first president with an MBA (from Harvard) and he appointed four CEOs to his cabinet, more than any previous president. The administration was also wedded to the fundamental tenets of Reaganomics: cut taxes and free the supply side and everything else will take care of itself. Mr Cheney even argued explicitly that “Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter.”
Mr Bush now leaves behind a tax system in some ways less efficient than the one he inherited, in need of annual patches, and unable to fund the government even in good times. He also leaves behind a broken budget process. Any economic triumphalism is long gone. Many of the CEOs, most notably Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O’Neill, proved to be dismal administrators. Reaganomics helped to produce a giant deficit. The financial crisis has made re-regulation rather than deregulation the mantra in Washington, while government has acquired a much bigger role in the economy through its backing of banks and car companies.

“I inherited a recession, I’m ending on a recession,” he noted at his press conference on January 12th. He wasn’t asking for pity, only to be judged on what happened in between. Unfortunately, that economic legacy is littered with wasted opportunity, bad judgments and politicised policy. The budget surplus he inherited is now a deficit, the fiscal hole in America’s retiree programmes is bigger than ever, the tax system is an unstable, patched-up mess.
It is not all his fault. But for the most part, good policy repeatedly took a back seat to Mr Bush’s overweening political ambition. Both the country and, ultimately, the Republican Party are left the worse for it.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.

As GW Bush takes his exit...
Analysis: Bush legacy _ grim times, gloomy nation
By BEN FELLER
WASHINGTON (AP) — Wars. Recession. Bailouts. Debt. Gloom.
The unvarnished review of George W. Bush's presidency reveals a portrait of America he never would have imagined.
Bush came into office promising limited government and humble foreign policy; he exits with his imprint on startling free-market intervention and nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was the president who pledged not to pass on big problems. Instead, he leaves a pile for Barack Obama.
Grading Bush's performance has its limitations. History offers a warning about judging a president and his tenure in the moment: The wisdom and decisions of a leader can look different years later, shaped by events impossible to know now. Leaders are entrusted to act in the nation's long-term interests.
That's fine for history, but people lead their lives and make their judgments in real time. And it was one of Bush's heroes, Ronald Reagan, who crystallized the way modern presidents are judged: Are people better off than they were when the president took office?
Based on that standard, the Bush report card is mixed at best. It is abysmal at worst.
This is his tenure: eight years bracketed by the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history and the worst economic collapse in three generations. In between came two wars, two Supreme Court appointments, a tough re-election, sinking popularity, big legislative wins and defeats, an ambitious effort to combat AIDS, a meltdown of the housing market, a diminishing U.S. reputation abroad, and more power invested in Dick Cheney than any vice president in history.
Bush got his tax cuts and education law in the first term, then swung hard and missed on Social Security and immigration in his second. He seized a bullhorn and united a country devastated by terrorism, but stumbled badly when a hurricane swallowed the Gulf Coast.
Many of his original campaign promises are dust. Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything.
In the heady days, Bush was the face of a party that ran the White House and Congress. Now Republicans hold neither. So much for a durable majority.
Bush said he would change the tone of Washington. He never did. Of course, neither did the Democrats running Congress.
Bush pushed all legal limits in targeting terrorists. They have not struck America again.
The president's defenders may well be right that his decisions will be viewed honorably over time.
For now, he is out of time. And realistic about his exit.
"It turns out," he said, "this isn't one of the presidencies where you ride off into the sunset."
___
By any standard, the economy is in atrocious shape. More than 11 million people are out of work. The unemployment rate is at a 16-year high. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by 33.8 percent in 2008, the worst decline since 1931. One in 10 U.S. homeowners is delinquent on mortgage payments or in foreclosure.
People are losing their college savings, their nest eggs, their dreams.
The country is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more broadly, against a threat of terrorism that predates Bush and still lurks from countless corners.
The Iraq conflict finally has an end in sight, but has cost much more in lives, time and money than even Bush expected.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government keeps spending money it doesn't have. The current budget deficit stands at a record $455 billion. That hole will get deeper — probably more than a staggering $1 trillion — as the bill grows for bailouts and efforts to jack up the economy.
And then there is the dismal public mood.
Huge numbers of people think the country is on the wrong track. Bush has had a negative approval rating for 47 months, the longest streak since such polling began. Almost two-thirds of people polled by the Pew Research Center said Bush's administration will be remembered for its failures.
"Nothing's going right," said Thomas Whalen, a professor of politics at Boston University who has written a book about presidential courage. "He was handed a country that was in pretty good shape. How you can argue that he's left the country in better shape?"
As they leave, Bush, Cheney and a cadre of West Wing advisers have been making that argument fervently. They insist some deeds are overshadowed, and others will be more appreciated over time.
The president takes pride in getting an education law that demands testing and accountability; a Medicare law that provides a prescription-drug benefit; an AIDS relief plan that has helped millions of people in impoverished lands; and a policy of working with religious organizations as a way to help needy people.
Bush also shaped the conservative direction of the Supreme Court, likely for decades, with his choice of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. But in between came the embarrassing rejection of another nominee, his friend and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, by conservatives from his own party.
Still, for the most part, this has been a presidency dominated by war.
Bush lost the country's faith when the war in Iraq had so many setbacks — the failed intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons in the first place, the botched postwar planning, the Mission Accomplished that wasn't, the sectarian killing that seemed like a quagmire.
His unpopular decision to send more troops for security is now viewed as a success, and Iraq is much more stable and free.
But most Americans still think the war was a deep, costly mistake. This is where Bush takes a long view, one that many political scientists find rosy: the liberation of 50 million in Iraq and Afghanistan will lead to peace and democracy in a troubled region.
He includes the staggering peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Bush got personally involved late in his presidency, only to see hopes for a peace deal fade, followed by more despair: a new war in the Mideast, with Israel's air and ground assault on Gaza in response to rocket attacks by Hamas.
"I believe when people objectively analyze this administration, they'll say, `Well, I see now what he was trying to do,'" Bush said last month.
When that might happen is unclear. Historians say it could take decades, if it happens at all.
Said Bush this summer: "I'll be dead when they finally figure it out."
___
Bush got elected on a promise of smaller government. Then he oversaw huge deficit spending. His mind-set changed when the country was attacked.
"The most important promise that he made was to keep America safe," said Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino. "He's singularly obsessed with that notion, just like Roosevelt was obsessed with World War II and Reagan was obsessed with the Cold War. This is a war on terror."
And so came the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against looming threats, treating those who harbor terrorists just like the killers themselves, and promoting an ideology of freedom across the globe. He saw himself as resolute in hard times; the country saw him as stubbornly stay-the-course.
"He put everything into his campaign for Iraqi democracy," said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. "The results seem to be quite painful for the United States, not just in terms of more than 4,000 dead soldiers, but the ideological fervor instead of a cool-headed pragmatism."
Where Bush still gets some public credit: The U.S. has not been attacked since Sept. 11. But it is hard to run a country without support of the people, and Bush steadily lost his as U.S. deaths rose in Iraq to more than 4,200.
The U.S. reputation abroad has suffered mightily, too.
At home, the second term brought a debacle of enormous proportions, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. The country watched in shame. The catastrophe cemented images of Bush out of touch: flying over a sinking city, praising his beleaguered emergency management chief for a "heckuva job."
"These big moments can really form presidencies," said Gary Gregg, a presidential expert at the University of Louisville.
Just when it appeared Bush might be heading for a quiet exit, the final year of his presidency was overtaken by the agonizing economic crash.
The housing market collapsed. Credit froze. Financial giants crumbled. Layoffs mounted. Bailouts kept coming, including an astounding $700 billion plan.
Bush gets some blame for the giant mess. He was not just the leader at the time, but one who promoted a get-out-of-the-way philosophy of regulation during a period when mortgage-lending standards grew lax. Yet he also got resistance from Congress when he pushed for greater oversight of the housing industry.
Bush is quick to mention that other people, many on Wall Street, share responsibility for the economic crisis. Regardless, it caps his tenure.
His main point is that when he saw trouble, he acted decisively.
"I've been a wartime president," he said. "I've dealt with two economic recessions now. I've had, you know, a lot of serious challenges. What matters to me is that I did not compromise my soul to be a popular guy."
So let history judge, Bush says.
The country already has.
EDITOR'S NOTE _ Ben Feller covers the White House for The Associated Press.
Hosted by Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

OSMO BECKO EXPLAINS GLOBAL WARMING
8 January 2009
Global Warming begin 12,000 years ago. The latest ice age reached its maximum 10,000 (BCE) Ice Pack extended from the artic well into the continental United States as well as covering most of Europe Russia. Huge ice packs were located in the Himalayas and Rockies. Glaciers ran along step valleys of the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada’s.

Once global warming began the great mass of ice and glaciers retreated to where they are today. Ice still exists at Greenland, the Artic and in several parts of northern Russia, Alaska and along the Bearing Sea. (Higher elevations) The upper Himalayas and French Alps as well as Mount Kilimanjaro Africa have some residue ice.

Global warming is caused by several factors. Among them: volcanic episodes, raging forest fires, and recent effects of human activity.

One of the major influences is caused by the presence of uranium, thorium, and other radioactive elements deep within the Earth. These radioactive elements are very heavy and over time sink to the center of the Earth until a critical mass has accumulated. This activity causes thermonuclear heat that radiates outward from the center of the planet. This intense heat works it way toward the surface of the Earth causing a shift in the crust creating cracks that allow molten rock to reach the surface causing volcanic activity as well as movement of tectonic plates. The oceans warm up as well as the land and finally the atmosphere allowing warmer weather and short winters exacerbating the effects created by the radioactive material.

Gradually the radioactive material is exhausted and the heat begins to fade. Eventually the volcanoes are depleted and the cracks in the crust are filled.
The current warming period is in its latter stages. By 2100 the process will have peaked and a cooling period will began.

Humans have polluted the skies and affected the heating process. It is probable that humans will move away from carbon fuels and corruption of the atmosphere will decline.
The process of radioactive material reaching critical mass and warming the planet has happened a number of times before and will happen again in the future.

Osmo Becko is a life long science buff. He is 95 years old and lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Proportionality And Terror
From Andrew Sullivan 5 January 2009
Noah Pollak asked me to provide some framework for a discussion of proportionality and just war theory with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza. In re-reading my Catechism and brushing up on just war theory, I am struck first of all by how alien the context seems for the current war. The asymmetric nature of the threat and the emergence of failed states run by mafioso religious fanatics makes everything more complicated. You could argue that this makes just war theory more important, rather than less, since we are in danger of having the rules of war dictated by barbarians. Or you could argue, along with the neocons, that Jihadist barbarism demands a response in kind. I favor the first view. And it is nonetheless fair to say, I think, that Israel's actions in Gaza fail every traditional just war justification.
In the history of the West, the laws of war are clear enough. You do not launch a just war if it leads to greater evils than the status quo ante. There must be a reasonable proportion between means and ends. Both sides should be able to acknowledge common human values, even as they fight over territory or ideology. And yet Hamas has never done this; has no capacity for abiding by even minimal moral norms, believes it has a moral responsibility to eradicate the Jewish state, and certainly finds the universalist and liberal moral law embedded in Western and largely Christian culture meaningless outside Islamic hegemony. Israel, for its part, is on a different moral plane than Hamas. Its internal critics write op-eds; they are not taken out and shot. But, in the face of what is, essentially, a 60 year war against enemies on all sides and within, it has long since disappeared down the self-reflecting mirrors of survivalist logic and existential panic. It looks to me like a society in danger of losing its sense of restraint to the logic of violence. It is lashing out because it feels it can do no other and senses its long-term survival at stake. Even if violence does not solve the problem and may make it worse, war can seem a better option now than disappearing passively in the next couple of decades. The stunning near-unanimity of Israelis behind the Gaza attack is proof of this. In Israel, it seems, it is always America in 2002.
But the point of just war theory is to give us a vantage point outside any particular contingency. Even though I may provoke a Jewish-Catholic fight here, the Catholic Catechism has as useful and concise a statement of the right of self-defense as anyone:
At one and the same time:
· the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
· all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
· there must be serious prospects of success;
· the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
Let's take each condition separately.
Is the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel "lasting, grave and certain"?
Taking the vantage point of the conflict from May 2007 on, Hamas has fired several thousand Qassam rockets with such imprecision that no distinction between civilian and military targets is meaningful (which is to say they were all war crimes). Until the recent conflict, Israel suffered 11 military deaths, 131 wounded, 8 civilian deaths and 83 wounded, with more than a hundred treated for shock. In a country of several million, these deaths and injuries were sustained within a relatively small and limited geographical area. (Gazans, in the same conflict, with a much smaller population and far more geographically concentrated, suffered 409 military deaths, 436 injured, and 92 civilian deaths - before the current outbreak even started.) The idea that the indefensible damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel makes an "all-out war" on all of Hamas and Gaza morally necessary in Charles Krauthammer's typically nuanced view, is obviously a non-starter. But one recalls that Krauthammer also believes in the moral imperative of torture.
Have all other means of ending Hamas's aggression been shown to be impractical or ineffective?
At some level, this is meaningless with Hamas. It exists in order to wage total war on Israel. But it is also unclear if the brutal economic embargo on Gaza - imposed by Egypt, Israel and the West for more than a year - was not actually already weakening Hamas from within, and rendering it less popular. It's certainly a plausible reading of recent history. And under just war theory, any possibility that the goal of restraining Hamas or undermining it could be achieved by non-military means renders the current Israeli counter-attack illicit.
Are there serious prospects for success?
We will see. Perhaps the "don't fuck with the Jews" message will finally be heard and a profound shift will occur in the hearts and minds of Gazans. But the Middle East's history of the past two decades (and its culture of eternal revenge) is not exactly encouraging in this regard.
If the goal is to prevent any further missiles ever reaching Israel from Gaza, I can't see it working either. Even if it is immensely successful as a military operation, this is a very hard test to meet. Even a few missiles will represent a "victory" for Hamas among those Muslims whom we need to appeal to. Even if Hamas is effectively wiped out in Gaza, its leadership massacred, its infrastructure badly damaged, it is hard to see who would replace it, or how a completely failed state in Gaza would then be more likely to restrain Islamist violence than even Hamas. If the goal is to persuade Gazans to ditch Hamas, the war has so far been counter-productive, and has certainly exposed the Sunni Arab dictatorships' de facto alliance with Israel against Iran-backed Hamas. So far, the big winner - again! - is Iran.
Is the evil inflicted by the war greater than the evil prevented?
It seems clear to me at this stage that the answer is yes. The loss of life this past week has been huge - far greater than any other stage of the conflict, and out of all proportion to the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel. In terms of casualties, we are talking about ratios of roughly a hundred to one. That makes this far from a close call morally. There is a reason, in other words, for many Europeans' horror. This is an extremely one-sided war, with one side essentially being attacked at will in a way that cannot avoid large numbers of civilian deaths. It is all very well understanding and sympathizing with Israel's dilemma in tackling Jihadist terror, as we should and must; it is another thing to watch women and children being terrorized and killed as they currently are in Gaza, with very little tangible gained as a result in terms of Israeli security. Maybe the long-term gains will shift the balance here. But those now arguing for exactly that proposition are those who believe the Iraq war has been a great success.
I need to repeat: There is no "just war" excuse for Hamas' murderous terrorism or for its refusal to acknowledge or peacefully co-exist with Israel. But there's no reading of traditional just war theory that can defend what Israel is now doing and has done either. Maybe I am missing an element here. Or maybe just war theory cannot account for modern terrorism. But if that is the case, then an argument must be made for a new framework of just warfare that can account for that. It does seem to me that the combination of apocalyptic terror and WMDs shift the equation. But with Hamas, we are not talking about WMDs. And we have to acknowledge something the neocons rarely do: Hamas is more democratically legitimate than the King of Jordan, an unelected plutocrat who runs a torture state.
Maybe Noah has a response to these points. I'm happy to air it. These are provisional thoughts and I reserve the right to adjust them. But until neoconservatives can do a better job at defending the morality of the current assault, they will lose the battle for global opinion, and deepen the crisis that the Israelis face in the new century.
Andrew Sullivan; The Daily Dish (Blog) Atlantic Monthly 2009

From The Times
Rusty superpower in need of careful driver

Matthew Parris
Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline
How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.
Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this “makes possible incredible change in the world”.
The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. “Yes, we can” was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.
But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.
The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.
But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.
Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.
As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say “weren't” - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.
But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.
And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.
What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.
Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.
Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.
Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.
Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.
In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.
But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.
We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. “Yes we can!” was an easy sentiment to recommend. “No we can't,” will be a far, far harder thing to say.

Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House

VANITY FAIR
The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.
by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum February 2009
With assistance from Philippe Sands.
January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battle in Florida whose outcome is effectively decided by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. In foreign affairs he promises an approach that will depart from the perceived adventurism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in places such as Kosovo and Somalia. (“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said in a debate with his opponent, Al Gore.) In domestic affairs Bush pledges to cut taxes and improve education. He promises to govern as a “compassionate conservative” and to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He comes into office with a $237 billion budget surplus.
On the day of the inauguration the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, declares a moratorium on the Clinton administration’s last-minute regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. This action is followed in the coming months by disengagement from the International Criminal Court and other international efforts. Nonetheless, the early presumption is that the administration’s affairs are in steady hands, though some disquieting signs are noted.
In the Oval Office on January 20 the first President Bush and the new President Bush greet each other with the words “Mr. President.”

Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: It was a bitterly cold day. They got back to the residence from the inauguration. The president was going over to have his first moment in the Oval Office as president of the United States. And he called for his father because he wanted his father to be there when it happened. If I recall correctly, George H. W. Bush was soaking in the tub trying to warm up, because it had been so cold on the viewing stand. Not only did the former president quickly get out of the tub, but he put his suit back on, because he was not going to enter the Oval Office without a suit. His hair was still kind of wet.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.
He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We had a couple of meetings with the president, and there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. With the cyber-security meeting, he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. It was as though he wanted these experts, these White House staff guys who had been around for a long time before he got there—didn’t want them buying the rumor that he wasn’t too bright. He was trying—sort of overly trying—to show that he could ask good questions, and kind of yukking it up with Cheney.
The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?
March 6, 2001 Secretary of State Colin Powell tells reporters that the United States intends to “engage with North Korea to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off.” The next day, Powell is forced by the administration to backpedal. Other early administration actions—abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty, abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change—signal that America’s way of doing business has changed. In time, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld will characterize traditional U.S. allies as “old Europe.”
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: During the Kosovo war we had developed a format which was, I think, one of the cheapest models for policy coordinating in the interests of the U.S. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright was in the driver’s seat, and the four European foreign ministers discussed with her on a daily basis how the war develops and so on. This was U.K., France, Italy, and Germany, together with the U.S., on the phone. We continued after the war, not every day, but this was the format, to discuss problems and understand the positions. And suddenly it stopped. We had very, very few—I don’t know, two or three times. Only for a very short period when Colin came in, and then it stopped, because the new administration was not interested any longer in a multilateral coordination.
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: My experience with Mr. Rumsfeld was: obviously an extremely intelligent person, with a lot of experience. But compared to Colin he was cold in terms of his personal relationships. He could have a sense of humor. I remember being at the famous Munich Security Conference that takes place every year. And I think Sergei Ivanov, who was the Russian defense minister at the time, went after him about some issue, and how the Americans had altered their position.
And Rumsfeld’s answer was “Well, that was the old Rumsfeld, and I am now the new Rumsfeld.” And of course it brought a great laugh. But he was terribly determined to have his way; there was no question about that.
One of his shticks—if I can call it that—at the nato meetings was always about caveats. He would pronounce the word “caveat” the way you and I might speak of some sort of sexual deviation. You know, people who had “caveats” were really evil, bad people.
Some caveats are not about an unwillingness to fight; some are about fundamental constraints on what you can do as a country. But Mr. Rumsfeld was not about listening and being cooperative. Mr. Rumsfeld was about getting the way of the United States, and don’t get in my way or my juggernaut will run over you.
May 16, 2001 A task force assembled and led by Vice President Dick Cheney unveils a blueprint for the administration’s energy program. The report, “National Energy Policy,” which had been in the works since shortly after the inauguration, calls for increased drilling for oil and more nuclear power. The energy task force becomes an immediate focus of controversy—and lawsuits—because its records and the list of advisers, mainly representatives of the oil and gas industries, are never divulged by the White House. The administration’s environmental policy is heavily politicized from the outset.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: Christine Todd Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, was one of several people in the Cabinet, along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who strongly supported a proactive position on climate change. And she was, I think, in Europe telling European governments that the U.S. position was to regulate carbon dioxide. And when she got back home, she had an interaction with the president in which she was very brusquely told that that was off the table. The turning point, essentially, was that Cheney grabbed hold of this issue and took down the whole notion of regulating CO2.
George W. Bush: “He always gets asked, Have you changed?,” says Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to President Bush, “and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
May 24, 2001 Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, a Republican, changes party, and control of the Senate shifts to the Democrats, making Tom Daschle the Senate majority leader and testing the administration’s public face of bipartisanship.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I went to a communications meeting the day after Jeffords switched. I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.
Someone made the suggestion that perhaps the president should call the new majority leader. And it’s like, Well, I’m not sure that’s really necessary. Margaret Tutwiler [assistant to the president and special adviser for communications] was there, and I remember her sitting at the head of the table, her eyes just sort of wide, and she sort of lost it. She’s like, Are you fricking kidding me? She goes, The president of the United States calls the new majority leader. The president of the United States calls the new minority leader, right? The president does these things because, you know, these things have to be done.
And, you know, people around the table—Karl [Rove], Karen [Hughes]—all these people were like, Oh, well, do we have to? It was like an absolutely serious debate.
Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to Laura Bush: In the first weeks after he took office, I was in those daily communications meetings, and the conversation I remember one morning turned to, you know, Tom Daschle was going to be coming to the White House—should we allow him to come in the door of the West Wing entrance, while the camera’s on, or should he come in on the side, so that cameras won’t see him? And I’m thinking, You know, the president should go out there and greet him just like he would if he was coming to his own house—which, by the way, it is. But they ended up having him come in on the side.
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: My view is that civility was a heartfelt, well-intended objective that went right off the rails the day of the recount. The recount poisoned the well from the beginning. A good number of people in this country didn’t believe Bush was a legitimate president. And you can’t change the tone under those circumstances. There was a genuine effort, and I think there was some early success with Ted Kennedy and the education stuff. But it was acrimonious from the beginning.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: There is a toxic nature to Washington that thrives on food fights and thrives on controversy and thrives on people not getting along. But I don’t think that’s the biggest part of the problem. It’s like the old argument of: somebody’s thrown in jail, and then they blame it on their environment. You’ve got to bear some accountability, even in a bad environment, for having a strength of will and a capacity to bring diverse opinion and not be bubbled in. We too easily say, Blame it on the Washington culture. Well, Washington is made up of people. It’s not like there’s this, like—you know, it’s not like some Star Trek episode where some room made me do it.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: After the recount, the disputed election, a lot of people said you needed to start to trim your sails: What are you going to cut back on as a way to show outreach to the other party? The president rejected that line of thinking, making the case that mandates are created by presidents with ideas, and he was going to follow through on the ideas that he ran on.
May 26, 2001 With big bipartisan majorities, Congress passes Bush’s $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts, the centerpiece of the administration’s economic program. The tax cuts are skewed heavily toward the affluent. Those making $1 million a year receive an average tax cut of $53,000. Those making $20,000 a year receive an average tax cut of $375. A second round of tax cuts will be enacted in 2003. By 2004 the budget deficit will exceed $400 billion.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: When Bush announced his “compassionate conservatism” [during the 2000 campaign], Elizabeth Dole’s communications director mocked him. He goes, Oh, that’s a great thing if you want to be president of the Red Cross, right? And that man was Ari Fleischer. Those are the people that ended up populating the White House. When the president’s tax package first came through Congress and first came through the Senate Finance Committee, his promise to have a tax cut for charitable giving for people who don’t itemize their tax deductions wasn’t even in the plan. [Senator] Charles Grassley looked at this and went, Oh, gosh, there must have been some oversight. And he was the one who inserted it into the tax plan. And the White House is the one that pulled it out.
June 16, 2001 During a five-day foreign tour Bush meets with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. After the meeting, in Slovenia, Bush declares, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” By all accounts, including his own, Bush puts great stock in the primacy of personal relationships.
Noelia Rodriguez: I wish that more people could have seen the president the way I experienced him. Even if you don’t agree with him or respect his opinions or his decisions—strip that away, if you’re able to—he is a caring human being.
I brought my mom to the White House, to get a tour the day before Thanksgiving. The president came in and greeted her—it was a total surprise. And on the spot he invited us to go to Camp David for Thanksgiving. Of course, we went, and it was Disneyland for adults. We went to chapel services before dinner. I remember we got there early. A few minutes later the president walks in with Mrs. Bush and the family, and you could see him looking around, and he sees my mom in the distance, and he literally shouts at her from across the chapel, “Grace, come sit over here with me.” And at dinner, again, he sees her, and he says, “Grace, you’re going to sit over here next to me.” And he tilted the chair against the table so that nobody would take her place.
Ed Gillespie, campaign strategist and later counselor to the president: Picking up the phone, calling people who are visiting an ailing father in the hospital, personal notes to people whose child just had surgery. Things big and small. It’s hard to describe it all, but they are the kinds of things that do inspire great loyalty—and that’s not why he does it, by the way.
August 6, 2001 While vacationing at his ranch, in Crawford, Texas, Bush is given a Presidential Daily Briefing memorandum whose headline warns that the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, is “determined to strike in U.S.” After being briefed on the document by a C.I.A. analyst, Bush responds, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We went into a period in June where the tempo of intelligence about an impending large-scale attack went up a lot, to the kind of cycle that we’d only seen once or twice before. And we told Condi that. She didn’t do anything. She said, Well, make sure you’re coordinating with the agencies, which, of course, I was doing. By August, I was saying to Condi and to the agencies that the intelligence isn’t coming in at such a rapid rate anymore as it was in the June-July time frame. But that doesn’t mean the attack isn’t going to happen. It just means that they may be in place.
On September 4, we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator [remote-controlled drone] flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration because the technology wasn’t ready: put a weapon on the Predator and use it as not only a hunter but a killer.
We had seen bin Laden when we had it in the Clinton administration, as just a hunter. We had seen him. So we thought, Man, if we could get this with a hunter-killer, we could see him again and kill him. So finally we have a principals meeting and the C.I.A. says it’s not our job to fly the Predator armed. And D.O.D. says it’s not our job to fly an unarmed aircraft.
Dick Cheney: “We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41,” says Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister. “So we were not very concerned.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
I just couldn’t believe it. This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of C.I.A. sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.
August 9, 2001 Bush issues a directive that permits federal funding for research on stem cells from human embryos—but only on the 60 stem-cell lines already in existence. That evening, he gives the first nationally televised speech of his presidency, explaining his decision. Five years later, Bush will use his veto power for the first time to kill legislation that would permit broader federal funding for stem-cell research. In the late summer of 2001, stem-cell research is the most contentious political question facing the nation.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: I had done a poll that finished the morning of 9/11. I was going to go to Washington that day to present the findings to Karl [Rove]. The amazing thing about that is: not a single question was asked about foreign policy, terrorism, national security. In the poll I’d been sitting on, Bush’s approval I think was 51 or 52 percent. Twenty-four hours later his approvals are 90 percent.
September 11, 2001 Terrorists crash two commercial airliners into New York’s World Trade Center, bringing both buildings down with a loss of some 3,000 lives. A third aircraft crashes into the Pentagon, killing 184. A fourth aircraft, its likely destination the U.S. Capitol, is brought down by the passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. It is known quickly that the perpetrators are members of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, based in Afghanistan, but the search for a connection to Saddam Hussein and Iraq begins immediately.
Sandra Kay Daniels, second-grade teacher at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, in Sarasota, Florida, whose classroom the president was visiting when he received news of the attacks: When he came into the classroom, our principal introduced him to the children, and he shook a couple of the kids’ hands and introduced himself, tried to kind of lighten the room up a little, because the kids were in awe. They were like little soldiers, quiet and just struck by the sight of the president. And he said, Let’s get started with reading. I’m here to celebrate you—maybe not those exact words, but that was the feeling in the room.
The story was “My Pet Goat” from our reading series. And we started our lesson. And all I remember is someone walking over to him, and I knew that was totally out of character, because this was a live broadcast and nobody was supposed to move. I mean, everybody was in their position. And when I saw this man, who I now know is Andy Card, walk over to him and whisper in his ear, I could see and I felt his whole demeanor change. It’s like he left the room mentally. He wasn’t there anymore mentally.
When it was time for the kids to read with him, he didn’t pick his book up. His book was sitting on the easel, and he didn’t pick it up. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what was wrong. And I’m thinking all the time, O.K., President Bush, pick up your book, that type of thing, you know. The cameras are rolling. My kids are here. And he left us mentally. I knew I had to continue with the lesson, and I did. I’m a teacher. I’ve got eyes all around the room. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. I see everything that goes on. And I’m thinking, O.K., he’ll join us in a minute. And he did.
Mary Matalin, assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president: My enduring memory is how calm people at the White House were, and focused on getting their job done. Right from the get-go, people were mature. That’s not the right word, but there wasn’t hand-wringing and hair on fire and Keystone Cops or anything like that. It was how you hope that any government would function. “Professional” doesn’t even scratch the surface. They were all so fully functioning and integrated in everything that they did. Everybody was confident in the other guy’s ability.
Richard Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.
And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: The real change in the president, in my opinion, didn’t actually happen until that Friday, when he traveled to New York. The situation on Tuesday was so—you really didn’t have time to reflect. In New York, the range of emotions that he went through—standing on the rubble, the bullhorn moment, but just as important, when he sat there in that room in private and met with those people who were still trying to learn the whereabouts of their loved ones, and hugging them, and where he got the badge.
He always gets asked, Have you changed?, and he instinctively recoils at that kind of question. But when something like this happens on your watch, there’s no way it can’t change you. It can’t not change your worldview—and it obviously changed his in a way that has been controversial for a lot of people.
September 18, 2001 Envelopes containing anthrax spores are mailed to media outlets in New York and Florida. This first attack is followed by a second, aimed at government offices in Washington. All together 5 people die and 22 are infected. The administration’s initial reaction, which turns out to be wrong, is to suggest that al-Qaeda is responsible. (It knows “how to deploy and use these kind of substances, so you start to piece it all together,” Cheney explains.)
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: Very shortly after 9/11 I was leading a briefing in the Roosevelt room about smallpox. The president was there, the vice president. Condi was there. The president didn’t ask a lot of questions. Don’t get me wrong—he did ask some questions. But the majority of the questions came from either Condi or the vice president. As the president was leaving the room, he turned to everybody and said, God help us all. We should all say very strong prayers tonight for guidance. It really stuck in my head. You’re the president of the United States basically saying, I’m going to pray tonight, and I hope all of you pray, too, because this is much bigger than all of us.
September 27, 2001 At O’Hare International Airport, Bush advises Americans on what they can do to respond to the trauma of September 11: “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Matthew Dowd: He was given a great, great window of opportunity where everybody wanted to be called to some shared sense of purpose and sacrifice and all that, and Bush never did it. And not for lack of people suggesting various things from bonds to, you know, some sort of national service. Bush decided to say that the best thing is: Everybody go about their life, and I’ll handle it.
There’s this West Texas thing in him, which is the—you know: Bad people are comin’ to town. Everybody go back to their house. I’ll take the burden on. Which, you know, may work in a Western town, but doesn’t work for a country that wants to be part of that conversation.
Mary Matalin: There was so much to do that was more important than—I mean, looking back, the national-unity thing is important, but it was way more important to re-structure the intelligence communities, way more important to harden targets. Know what I mean? It was all hands on deck. We were working on other shit. Everyone’s pulverized and beat, and there’s 24 hours in a day, so woulda, coulda, shoulda, but, you know, there was no office to do “feel-good” stuff.
Matthew Dowd: Karl wasn’t receptive to ideas that would’ve called the country to certain things and brought them to a common purpose and a sense of shared sacrifice. Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good.
Scott McClellan, deputy White House press secretary and later press secretary: I remember Karl Rove was out there talking at some events about how we’d use 9/11, run on 9/11 in the midterms, and that it was important to do so.
October 7, 2001 American and British forces begin an aerial campaign against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda has its base, followed weeks later by a ground invasion. The Taliban government falls and al-Qaeda is routed from some of its strongholds. One person captured is John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. His handling proves to be a harbinger. The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jim Haynes, authorizes military intelligence to “take the gloves off.”
Jesselyn Radack, ethics adviser at the Department of Justice: I was called with the specific question of whether or not the F.B.I. on the ground could interrogate [Lindh] without counsel. And I had been told unambiguously that Lindh’s parents had retained counsel for him. I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said essentially, Oops, they did it anyway. They interrogated him anyway. What should we do now? My office was there to help correct mistakes. And I said, Well, this is an unethical interrogation, so you should seal it off and use it only for intelligence-gathering purposes or national security, but not for criminal prosecution.
A few weeks later, Attorney General Ashcroft held one of his dramatic press conferences, in which he announced a complaint being filed against Lindh. He was asked if Lindh had been permitted counsel. And he said, in effect, To our knowledge, the subject has not requested counsel. That was just completely false. About two weeks after that he held another press conference, because this was the first high-profile terrorism prosecution after 9/11. And in that press conference he was asked again about Lindh’s rights, and he said that Lindh’s rights had been carefully, scrupulously guarded, which, again, was contrary to the facts, and contrary to the picture that was circulating around the world of Lindh blindfolded, gagged, naked, bound to a board.
October 26, 2001 Bush signs the USA Patriot Act, which among other things gives the government far-reaching powers to conduct surveillance. In addition, Bush will issue a secret executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps on American citizens and others living in the United States, bypassing the procedures mandated by Congress.
Jesselyn Radack, ethics adviser at the Department of Justice: When Ashcroft initially came on board as attorney general, he was a somewhat beleaguered person. He had just lost an election to a dead man [Mel Carnahan, his opponent in the Missouri senatorial race, who had been killed in a plane crash]. We were told that he liked to conduct things more in a top-down corporate manner, rather than with Janet Reno’s glasnost openness. The real shift came after 9/11. It wasn’t that we were sent a memo saying all the laws were out the window, but that was definitely the tone that pervaded the department.
November 1, 2001 A presidential executive order exempts presidents, vice presidents, and their designees from provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act and permits unclassified archived materials to be kept sealed in perpetuity, rather than being released after 12 years, as the law allows.
Robert Dallek, presidential biographer: I’ve testified twice before the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, protesting this executive order. Now, there are two constraints that operate in relation to all executive materials. One is that if you’re going to violate someone’s privacy you are constrained from releasing the material. A much bigger issue is one of national security, and that’s what causes years to go by before many, many documents are released. So those are the two constraints.
But broadening this—and not only in relation to the president, but in relation to the vice president—reflects, I think, the Cheney proposition that the Watergate crisis put too many limitations on executive power.
And so we now have the issue of what sort of documentary record we’re going to find. I mean, this is a separate issue, I guess, but will they have sanitized the records?
November 13, 2001 Bush issues an order declaring that accused terrorists will be tried by secret military commissions that dispense with traditional rights and protections.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and later to the secretary of state: A small group of administration lawyers drafted the president’s military order establishing the military commissions, but without the knowledge of the rest of the government, including the national-security adviser, me, the secretary of state, or even the C.I.A. director. And even though many of the substantive problems with the military commissions as created by the original order have been resolved by Congress in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hamdan case, we have been suffering from this original process failure ever since.
December 2001 Osama bin Laden and many of his followers have taken refuge in the mountains of Tora Bora, on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, where an attempt to dislodge and capture them proves unavailing. A decision by Washington has the effect of allowing bin Laden to escape into the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Gary Berntsen, C.I.A. intelligence commander at Tora Bora: We knew he was there—he had fallen into the mountains with about a thousand of his followers. That’s why we threw a BLU-82 [the bomb known as a “daisy cutter”] at him. At one point we knew where he was; we allowed food and water to go in to him. And then we came in with a 15,000-pound device. Bin Laden was outside the lethal effects of that blast. I understand he was injured.
I got a message out and made my request for inclusion of what I believed was needed—800 Rangers. The army of the Eastern Alliance on the north side had blocking positions there, so al-Qaeda couldn’t get back out into Afghanistan. But I was always concerned about the Pakistani side. I explained clearly that this was our opportunity to, so to speak, kill the baby in the crib. I was very concerned about them breaking out [south] into Pakistan, because I knew, if they did that, containing this thing would be a significant problem.
Unfortunately, the decision was made at the White House to use the Pakistani frontier force. What the White House didn’t understand is that the frontier force had cooperated with the Taliban. So they used individuals who were very, very sympathetic to the Taliban to set up purported blocking positions.
December 17, 2001 Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been C.E.O., is awarded a 10-year omnibus contract to provide the Pentagon with support services for everything from fighting oil-well fires to building military bases to serving meals. As defense secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney had pushed strenuously to outsource a variety of military functions to private contractors—part of a broader effort to transfer government functions of all kinds to the private sector.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Cheney brings this accumulation of power and ability to influence the bureaucracy to a fine art. He surpasses Kissinger even. This is all the more ironic because Cheney was the antithesis of this when he was chief of staff of the White House under Gerald Ford and when he was secretary of defense. He was very deferential. He was not trying to insinuate himself.
But he turns everything on its head and he becomes the power. And he does it through his network. This is a guy who’s an absolute genius at bureaucracy and an absolute genius at not displaying his genius at bureaucracy. He’s always quiet.
So are most of his minions, not all of them. [David] Addington [the vice president’s counsel] is brilliant, and Addington is a strange beast, and Addington is sort of the Ayman al-Zawahiri for Cheney, the brains trust. [Chief of Staff Lewis] Libby was the doer. Libby was a real bureaucrat’s dream.
January 8, 2002 Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act, which, among other things, mandates that, in return for continued access to federal funding, states must institute standardized tests to ensure that students meet educational goals. The bill, co- authored by Senator Edward Kennedy, passed with a large bipartisan majority.
Margaret Spellings, Bush’s domestic-policy adviser and later secretary of education: George Bush ran for office as a different kind of Republican and called for some things like annual measurement, accountability, closing the achievement gap—things that other Republicans hadn’t talked about. I mean, the standard Republican stock fare was Abolish the Department of Education. So he had had some equities on an issue that few Republicans previous to him had really talked about, especially on behalf of poor kids.
I’ve learned a lot from [Ted Kennedy], and I think he’s the consummate legislator. He is a person of his word. I remember the very first time that the so-called Big Four—it was Kennedy, Jeffords, John Boehner, and George Miller—met in the Oval Office to talk about how we were going to proceed. It was in the first week of the administration. At the end of the meeting—after we had agreed that we really needed to get something done, we had to close the achievement gap, I’m really serious, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, all of those sorts of things—the president, in closing the meeting, as the press was about to come in, said something like: You know, they’re going to ask us about vouchers. They’re going to—the press is going to try to find division immediately. And I am not going to talk about vouchers today. I’m going to say we talked about how we’re going to close the achievement gap.
And, you know, we got to work.
January 11, 2002 A new detention-and-interrogation center at Guantánamo Bay receives the first of an eventual 550 “unlawful combatants” from the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. Guantánamo is chosen because it is not officially U.S. soil and thus provides a rationale for denying detainees protections under American and international law, creating a “legal black hole.”
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: After 9/11 the administration faced two sharply conflicting imperatives. The first was fear of another attack. This permeated the administration. Everyone felt it. And it led to the doctrine of pre-emption, which has many guises, but basically means that you can’t wait for the usual amounts of information before acting on a threat because it may be too late. They were really scared. They were afraid of what they didn’t know. They were very afraid they didn’t have the tools to meet the threat. And they had this extraordinary sense of responsibility—that they would be responsible for the next attack. They really thought of it as having blood on their hands, and that they’d be forgiven once but not twice.
On the other hand, there was a countervailing imperative, and that was the law, because there had grown up since the 70s—for a lot of good reasons—some extraordinary restrictions on presidential power and presidential war power, many of them embodied in criminal laws, many of them vague or uncertain, never having been applied before, certainly none of them ever applied in this new context. And there was enormous legal uncertainty about how far we could go.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and later to the secretary of state: The Department of Justice often was the decisive voice on detainee matters, but the Justice Department really never lived up to its name. It was not the Department of Justice—it was often the Department of Litigation Risk, and they saw everything through the perspective of whether a decision might result in some kind of liability, whether someone might get sued or prosecuted. But that’s not the only role of the lawyer. The role of the lawyer is also to exercise good judgment and to look at long-term consequences, and ultimately to do what’s the ethically and morally correct thing.
January 29, 2002 In his State of the Union message, Bush invokes the specter of an “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran, North Korea—and vows that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Afghanistan remains unstable, but resources and attention are shifting elsewhere.
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee: In February of ‘02, I had a visit at Central Command, in Tampa, and the purpose was to get a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan. At the end of the briefing, the commanding officer, Tommy Franks, asked me to go into his office for a private meeting, and he told me that we were no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan and, among other things, that some of the key personnel, particularly some special-operations units and some equipment, specifically the Predator unmanned drone, were being withdrawn in order to get ready for a war in Iraq.
That was my first indication that war in Iraq was as serious a possibility as it was, and that it was in competition with Afghanistan for matériel. We didn’t have the resources to do both successfully and simultaneously.
February 7, 2002 Bush issues an executive order denying any protections of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. The order comes after an intense behind-the-scenes battle pitting the State Department against the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and the Office of the Vice President.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Based on what the secretary and [State Department legal adviser] Will Taft were telling me, I think they both were convinced that they had managed to get the president’s attention with regard to what they thought was the governing document, the Geneva Conventions. I really think it came as a surprise when the February memo was put out. And that memo, of course, was constructed by Addington, and I’m told it was blessed by one or two people in O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel]. And then it was given to Cheney, and Cheney gave it to the president. The president signed it.
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: To conclude that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply—it doesn’t follow from that, or at least it shouldn’t, that detainees don’t get certain rights and certain protections. There are all sorts of very, very good policy reasons why they should have been given a rigorous legal regime whereby we could legitimatize their detention. For years there was just a giant hole, a legal hole of minimal protections, minimal law.
February 14, 2002 The Bush administration proposes a Clear Skies Initiative, which relaxes air-quality and emissions standards. This is followed by a Healthy Forests Initiative, which opens up national forests to increased logging. Climate change becomes a forbidden subject.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: At the beginning of the Bush administration, Ari Patrinos, a very senior science official who had run the Department of Energy’s climate-change research program for many years, and a half-dozen high-ranking federal science officials were brought together and told to explain the science and help develop policy options for a proactive climate-change policy for the administration. They moved into an office downtown, and they worked very hard and were briefing at the Cabinet level, in the White House. Cheney was there, Colin Powell was there, Commerce Secretary [Don] Evans was there. They were making the case on climate change.
And one day they were told: Take it down, pack it up, go back to your offices—we don’t need you anymore.
May 6, 2002 The effort to create an International Criminal Court, to which the United States and more than a hundred other nations have signed on, encounters a setback when Bush withdraws American participation by “unsigning” the I.C.C. treaty.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: When I started at the I.C.C., in 2003, the Bush administration appeared hostile towards the court, as though we were radioactive. But what started with hostility over time became less so. All of a sudden the court was seen to be useful. On Darfur, for example, the administration could have vetoed the Security Council vote referring Darfur to my office. They didn’t. That was a big change. But I’ve kept a respectful distance. They don’t give me intelligence. They cannot control me. When I received the U.N. Commission report on Darfur, inside the boxes there was a sealed envelope which appeared to contain classified U.S. information. We returned it to the U.S. Embassy, without opening it.
Ironically, the hostility has helped in my dealings with countries that might otherwise perceive me to be in the pocket of the Americans. It has been one positive factor in the Arab and African worlds. The U.S. distance from the court seems to have had the very opposite effect of that intended—of strengthening it.
June 1, 2002 In a graduation speech at West Point, Bush advances a new strategic doctrine of pre-emption, stating that the United States reserves the right to use force to deal with threats before they “fully materialize.” Preparations for war with Iraq are not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the spring, as Condoleezza Rice discusses diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq with several senators, Bush pokes his head into the room and says, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
Donald Rumsfeld: “He’s sort of like a snake on a hot summer day sleeping on the road in the sun,” a Canadian general once observed. “If an eyelid flickers, you say it’s very animated.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
July 23, 2002 Senior British defense, diplomatic, and intelligence officials meet in London to discuss the American position on war with Iraq. An account of the meeting, known as the Downing Street Memo, is drawn up by one of the participants, but remains secret for several years. In the meeting, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, gives an assessment of his recent talks in Washington: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: I asked George [Tenet, the C.I.A. director], What did the national intelligence estimate [N.I.E.] that we had done on Iraq tell us about what would be the conditions during the period of combat, what would be the conditions post-combat, and what was the basis of our information on the weapons of mass destruction? Tenet said, We’ve never done an N.I.E.
Paul Pillar, national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the C.I.A.: The makers of the war had no appetite for and did not request any such assessments [about the aftermath of war]. Anybody who wanted an intelligence-community assessment on any of this stuff would’ve come through me, and I got no requests at all.
As to why this was the case, I would give two general answers. Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much.
The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the job of selling the war.
August 1, 2002 A secret memorandum prepared by Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo sets out the limits on coercive interrogation by U.S. government officials of those captured in the war on terror, finding that there are essentially none. The memo abandons international constraints and raises the threshold of what constitutes “torture.”
September 8, 2002 In a television interview, Condoleezza Rice builds the case against Saddam Hussein by invoking the nuclear threat. “We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon.… We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” This assertion is echoed by Vice President Cheney, even though Iraq’s nuclear capability is widely questioned by numerous experts.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations and later the British special representative in Iraq: When I arrived in New York, in July 1998, it was quite clear to me that all the members of the Security Council, including the United States, knew well that there was no current work being done on any kind of nuclear-weapons capability in Iraq.
It was, therefore, extraordinary to me that later on in this saga there should have been any kind of hint that Iraq had a current capability. Of course, there were worries that Iraq might try, if the opportunity presented itself, to reconstitute that capability. And therefore we kept a very close eye, as governments do in their various ways, on Iraq trying to get hold of nuclear base materials, such as uranium or uranium yellowcake, or trying to get the machinery that was necessary to develop nuclear-weapons-grade material.
We were watching this the whole time. There was never any proof, never any hard intelligence, that they had succeeded in doing that. And the American system was entirely aware of this.
September 15, 2002 In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the assistant to the president for economic policy, Lawrence Lindsey, estimates the cost of a war with Iraq to be in the neighborhood of $100 billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, quickly revises the figure downward to $50 billion to $60 billion, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld calls Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” Lindsey is fired in December. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is dismissed the same day. Years later, an analysis by Nobel-laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes will estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: What happened was the president made the point to the staff that, if America ever goes to war, we go to war because it’s the right thing to do regardless of the cost. That is a moral issue, and so we should not be talking to anybody about how much it may or may not cost; the whole issue is, do you or don’t you go? And if you go, you pay whatever the cost is to win. The day the president dismissed Larry and Secretary O’Neill, I remember he said to me that he noticed that morning that everybody in the Situation Room was sitting up a bit straighter.
October 10–11, 2002 By an overwhelming vote, and at a politically delicate moment, Congress passes the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, which gives the president a free hand to take military action. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, invited to the White House before the vote, has as yet found no evidence that Iraq has an active program to produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
Bob Graham: Unlike the first George Bush, who had purposefully put off the vote on the Persian Gulf War until after the elections of 1990—we voted in January of 1991—here they put the vote in October of 2002, three weeks before a congressional election. I think there were people who were up for election who didn’t want, within a few days of meeting the voters, to be at such stark opposition with the president.
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: The most remarkable thing was the talk that we had with the vice president before we were taken to Mr. Bush. To our surprise, we had no idea we would be taken to Mr. Cheney first, but we were, and we sat down, and I thought it was more a sort of a courtesy call before we went on to President Bush.
Much of it was a fairly neutral discussion, but at one point he suddenly said that you must realize that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament. It was a little cryptic. That was how I remembered it, and I think that’s also how Mohamed [El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was present], remembered it. I was a little perplexed, because it was a total threat, after all, to talk about the discrediting of us. Later, when I reflected on it, I think what he wanted to say was that if you guys don’t come to the right conclusion, then we will take care of the disarmament.
November 4, 2002 Defying precedent, the Republicans make decisive gains in the midterm elections; the White House interprets the results as an across-the-board green light. In an interview with Esquire released in December, John J. Dilulio Jr., the former head of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, complains that the “compassionate conservative” agenda is dead and that politics alone drives the White House.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: I happened to be in the stairwell of the West Wing when the president was walking down, and he goes, Hey! He goes, Dilulio piece. He goes, Is this true? Is this … I mean, is this stuff … is this, is he right? What the hell’s goin’ on?
And whoever was with him at the time—it was probably Andy Card, Andy and Karl—they were like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, it’s fine. We’ll get back to it. That afternoon we get a call from Josh Bolten, who was at the time the head of domestic policy, saying, O.K., we need to have a “compassion” meeting.
I’ll never forget the discussion—we’re sitting around the table, and someone says, I know what we should do. We should tackle chronic homelessness. I hear there are like 15,000 homeless people in America.
What can you say to that?
November 25, 2002 The Department of Homeland Security comes into being. The new department, an amalgam of nearly two dozen existing agencies, soon emerges as perhaps the most dysfunctional and unwieldy of all the federal departments. By presidential directive D.H.S. issues a daily color-coded advisory of “threat conditions.” Its secretary, Tom Ridge, later acknowledges that the alerts were sometimes heightened under pressure from the administration.
Michael Brown, director of fema, which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security: Bush’s strength was—he would say to everybody in the room, Tell me what the problem is and I’ll make a decision. The detrimental aspect of that is the president would make a decision and in his mind it was over with. There was no changing course. The blinders are on. You had to work incredibly hard to get back in front of that line of sight to say, We need to take a different tack here.
Condoleezza Rice: “You thought you had the dream team of foreign-policy experts,” says Charles Duelfer, the former weapons inspector in Iraq, “but they weren’t a team at all.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
I’m asked at one point for my input, and I basically say we should not have a Department of Homeland Security, because it’s going to be disruptive to create it in the midst of all of these things going on. [Later,] I remember being in the car alone with Bush, where I’m talking to him about the department and how it’s not working and how we really need to make some changes. And while I thought he may have been listening, I quickly came to the conclusion that he wasn’t, because his answer to it was: Well, we’re bringing in a new leader, a new secretary or deputy secretary, and he’ll be able to fix all these things.
He had made the decision, and we’re going forward. And if things aren’t working, we don’t need to revisit the original decision. We’ll just put somebody else in there.
David Kuo: Every time you had a conversation with him, he would make it clear the subject was important. Bush would say, I care about this. Let’s get this done. But it was like a ship whose wheel is not attached to the rudder.
December 2, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld signs off on a memo from the Defense Department’s legal counsel, Jim Haynes, permitting the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, including stress positions, isolation, and sleep deprivation. Rumsfeld writes on the memo, “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The memo is eventually rescinded, after strenuous objections from the general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, among others, but policies and practices continue to be influenced by the philosophy outlined in the earlier Bybee-Yoo “torture memo.”
Alberto Mora, navy general counsel: When I saw the [Haynes] memorandum, I thought this was all a mistake. My assumption going into my first meeting with Haynes was that once these mistakes were pointed out the authorization would be instantaneously reversed. So I had a meeting with Jim, in which I indicated that I felt the document authorized abusive treatment that included torture. Jim’s instantaneous response was that, no, it didn’t. I asked him to think carefully about this, and I took him through the analysis that this could be torture, that it would necessarily have legal repercussions, including to the military-commission process, and could also engender liability for all individuals associated with this process.
I spent about an hour with him, and my sense was that he’d be picking up the phone and calling the secretary to have those authorizations rescinded. The next day I flew to Miami for Christmas vacation, thinking the problem was solved. I then got a phone call saying that the reports of abuse were continuing. That’s when I realized that this was not a simple mistake but that, in fact, people had adopted this course of action consciously.
As soon as I got back, I requested a second meeting with Haynes, in which I took him through some of the same reasoning but in much greater detail. I also discussed much more heavily the potential liability of individuals involved in authorizing these kinds of techniques. I pointed out Secretary Rumsfeld’s handwritten notation at the bottom of the authorization page. I said, This may be a joke, but it would not be regarded as a joke potentially by a prosecuting attorney or a plaintiff’s attorney, and I said that this would lead to very painful cross-examination of Secretary Rumsfeld on the stand. The implication or allegation by opposing counsel would be that this constituted a wink and a nod to the interrogators. I closed by saying, Protect your client—thinking that was the most powerful message one attorney could deliver to another.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council and later to the secretary of state: One of the great tragedies for this administration has been the damage caused by its detainee policies—the decision to set up Guantánamo without the involvement of the international community, the issuance of the president’s executive order creating military commissions, aspects of the C.I.A. interrogation program, the conduct of certain renditions [sending detainees to other countries for interrogation], and the decision about the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions. The most serious error is not any of these decisions individually or even collectively, but the administration’s inability to change course as the magnitude of the problems caused by these decisions became apparent.
January 28, 2003 Bush delivers his State of the Union message and continues to make the case for war with Iraq. The speech includes the assertion, later shown to be based on a crude forgery, that Saddam Hussein has “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The administration had been warned that the information was unreliable.
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: I think [Tony] Blair, whom I admire for many things and respect for many things, but when he went out and he talked about the Iraqis’ being able to use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, now that went much too far.
There was another example, and that was the famous case of the alleged contract between Iraq and Niger for the import of yellowcake, uranium oxide. I was very curious about that, because I could not see why Iraq should at this stage, in 2002, want to import yellowcake. That’s a long, long way from the enriched nuclear materials they can use in a bomb. I didn’t suspect that there was a forgery behind it.
January 31, 2003 Bush meets at the White House with Tony Blair. A secret account of the meeting, written by Sir David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign-policy adviser and later ambassador to Washington, will become public three years later. The administration’s public stance is that it hopes to avoid war with Iraq. In the meeting, however, Bush and Blair agree on a start date for the war, irrespective of the outcome of U.N. inspections: March 10. Bush proposes that a pretext for war might be provided if an aircraft were painted with U.N. colors and sent in low over Iraq, in the hope that it would draw fire. According to the memo, Bush also “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups” in Iraq once Saddam was removed from power.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon belatedly turns attention to planning for the aftermath of war.
Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq: When I went to see Rumsfeld at the end of January, I said, O.K., I’ll do this for the next few months for you. I said, you know, Let me tell you something, Mr. Secretary. George Marshall started in 1942 working on a 1945 problem. You’re starting in February working on what’s probably a March or April problem. And he said, I know, but we have to do the best with the time that we have. So that kind of frames everything.
February 5, 2003 Colin Powell appears before the United Nations Security Council to present evidence that Iraq is actively seeking to make or acquire weapons of mass destruction. In the ensuing months, it will emerge that, although Powell was unaware of the fact, many of his claims are unfounded.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I spoke over and over and over with Colin Powell. He always looked, I don’t know, not at me, but I could see the pain in his eyes. These are very powerful questions, he used to say. I understood. It meant: I have serious problems inside the administration.
Hans Blix: In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing, because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue.
If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, that’s what we would have reported. And then I think that, at that stage, certainly the intelligence ought to have drawn the conclusion that their evidence was poor.
I now feel sorry for Colin Powell. He was given the material by the C.I.A., and we read in the newspapers how he threw out a lot of it. But he retained some. And then he came to the Security Council, and, of course, in a way, this was to tell the world that, Look, this is what we’ve found. We have the means to do it. The inspectors are very good boys and nice, and we listen to them, but they haven’t seen this, and this is what there is.
February 25, 2003 General Eric Shinseki, the army chief of staff, tells a congressional hearing that “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” will be required to mount a successful occupation of Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly rebukes Shinseki, stating that the general’s estimate is “wildly off the mark.” Shinseki is forced to retire early.
Jay Garner: When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991, I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent—you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here’s probably the ballpark, and I didn’t have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.
March 19, 2003 The Iraq war begins. Two weeks of “shock and awe” bombardment herald the invasion by ground forces. U.S. and British troops make up 90 percent of the “international coalition,” which includes modest support from other countries. The defeat of Iraqi forces is a foregone conclusion, but within days of the occupation Baghdad is beset by looting that coalition forces do nothing to stop. Rumsfeld dismisses the breakdown of civil order with the explanation “Stuff happens.” Kenneth Adelman, a Rumsfeld-appointed member of a Pentagon advisory board, and initially a supporter of the war, later confronts the defense secretary.

Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.
Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.
I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?
So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.
And so that was not a successful conversation.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations and later the British special representative in Iraq: The administration of Iraq never recovered. It was a vacuum in security that became irremediable, at least until the surge of 2007. And to that extent, four years were not only wasted but allowed to take on the most terrible cost because of that lack of planning, lack of resources put in on the ground. And I see that lack of planning as residing in the responsibility of the Pentagon, which had taken charge, the office of the secretary of defense, with the authority of the vice president and the president, obviously, standing over that department of government.
May 1, 2003 Aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, under a banner reading, mission accomplished, Bush proclaims that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Meanwhile, decisions have been made that will inadvertently prolong major combat operations, chief among them the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. The responsibility for this decision, which is promulgated by the new U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, remains unclear.
Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq: My plan was to not disband the Iraqi Army but to keep the majority of it and use them. And the reason for that is we needed them, because, number one, there were never enough people there for security. I mean, I’ll give you an example. My first day in Baghdad, I went to see Scott Wallace, who was the corps commander, the V Corps commander, and I said, Scott, I need a lot of help here on security. And he said, Let me show you my map. I walked over to the map. And he had 256 sites that day he was guarding that he had never planned on. He just didn’t have the force structure to do it.
So we said, O.K., we’ll bring the army back. Our plan was to bring back about 250,000 of them. And I briefed Rumsfeld. He agreed. Wolfowitz agreed. Condoleezza Rice agreed. George [Tenet] agreed. Briefed the president on it. He agreed. Everybody agreed.
So when that decision [to disband] was made, I was stunned.
Charles Duelfer, U.N. and U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: One Iraqi colonel told me, You know, our planning before the war was that we assumed that you guys couldn’t take casualties, and that was obviously wrong. I looked at him and said, What makes you think that was wrong? He goes, Well, if you didn’t want to take casualties, you would have never made that decision about the army.
May 27, 2003 Bush signs legislation authorizing the President’s Emergency Plan for aids Relief (pepfar). He visits Africa, a main focus of the legislation, soon thereafter. pepfar commits some $15 billion for aids prevention and treatment over a period of five years. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof concludes, “Mr. Bush has done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did.”
Michael Merson, M.D., international aids researcher, who has evaluated the relief program: Look, pepfar is the largest commitment ever made by any nation for a global health activity that’s dedicated to a single disease. I mean, that’s just not disputable. It has a prevention component, a treatment component, and a care component, but treatment is the centerpiece. The last number I’ve seen is that this initiative has led to treatment of more than 1.7 million people, most of them in Africa. Now, that’s not all the people who need treatment, but it’s a huge amount. pepfar at least tripled our aid flow to Africa—I’m talking about total aid flow.
August 19, 2003 A month after Bush indicates little concern about an insurgency in Iraq with the remark “Bring ‘em on,” a car bomb in Baghdad destroys the headquarters of the United Nations mission, killing the U.N. chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello. President Bush receives the news of the bombing while playing golf, and by his own account decides at that moment to give up the game in solidarity with troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (although two months later he plays a round at Andrews Air Force Base). The U.N.-headquarters bombing is seen as the start of the full-blown insurgency.
Jay Garner: I think a lot of the problem the president had is: people around him were doing what he said, and nobody was doing the analytical questioning of the things we were doing where you could do all the puts and takes and say, O.K., Mr. President, here’s all the pros to do this and here’s all the cons to do this, and here’s the likely outcome. Now, let’s make a decision.
I don’t think that ever happened. I never saw anything like that. And I think the Defense Department was enamored with what they felt they’d accomplished in Afghanistan with a very small force of basically special-ops guys and the air force. And they looked at it as a high-tech thing. Nation building is a low-tech thing. Get a whole bunch of you. Roll up your sleeves. Get a bunch of shovels, and then everybody goes out and busts their ass every day. We just didn’t have enough soldiers to do that.
January 23, 2004 David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, resigns his position, affirming his belief that no W.M.D. stockpiles will be found in Iraq; the following week he discusses his conclusions at the White House. Nine months later his successor, Charles Duelfer, will conclude officially that Iraq not only did not possess W.M.D. but did not have an active program in place to develop them. The structural supports of Powell’s U.N. presentation begin to crumble.
Karl Rove: “Karl came from a perspective of: you defeat people in politics by calling one side bad and one side good,” says Matthew Dowd, a onetime Bush-campaign strategist. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Well, [Powell] got a telephone call each time a pillar fell. It was either John [McLaughlin, deputy C.I.A. director], calling Rich [Armitage], and Rich telling him, or it was George [Tenet] or John calling the secretary. And I remember this vividly because he would walk through my door, and his face would grow more morose each time, and he’d say, Another pillar just fell. I said, Which one this time? And, of course, the last one was the mobile biological labs.
Finally, when that call came, the secretary came through the door and said, The last pillar has just collapsed. The mobile biological labs don’t exist. Turned around and went back into his office.
David Kay, chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: As we turned to the trailers, it was probably—I guess the single biggest shock I had during the entire inspection process, because I’d been powerfully moved by Powell’s statement to the Council. Well, when we started tearing it apart, we discovered it was not based on several sources. It was based on one source, and it was an individual [code-named Curveball] held by German intelligence. They had denied the U.S. the right to directly interview him. And they only passed summaries—and really not very good ones—of their interrogations with him. The Germans had refused to pass us his name even.
As you delved into his character and his claims, none of them bore any truth. The case just fell apart.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I was astonished that the Americans used Curveball, really astonished. This was our stuff. But they presented it not in the way we knew it. They presented it as a fact, and not as the way an intelligence assessment is—could be, but could also be a big lie. We don’t know.
April 13, 2004 At a press conference Bush is asked by John Dickerson of Time to name the biggest mistake he has made since 9/11. Bush is unable to come up with an answer. He replies, “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it.”
David Kay: He has a tremendous sense of calm and certitude about the positions he takes, and is unusually doubt-free about them. Most people, when they make monumental decisions, understand that they’re doing it under conditions of great uncertainty, and are not fully at the time really able to understand what the consequences might be—and that frightens them, or at least they have concern, disquietude about it. This president has none of that, as far as I can tell.
April 28, 2004 A televised report on 60 Minutes II reveals widespread abuse and humiliation of detainees by U.S. military personnel and private contractors at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, dating back to October 2003 and known to the Defense Department since January.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board: I said to Rumsfeld, Well, the way you handled Abu Ghraib I thought was abysmal. He says, What do you mean? I say, It broke in January of—what was that, ‘04? Yeah, ‘04. And you didn’t do jack shit till it was revealed in the spring. He says, That’s totally unfair. I didn’t have the information. I said, What information did you have? You had the information that we had done these—and there were photos. You knew about the photos, didn’t you? He says, I didn’t see the photos. I couldn’t get those photos. A lot of stuff happens around here. I don’t follow every story. I say, Excuse me, but I thought in one of the testimonies you said you told the president about Abu Ghraib in January. And if it was big enough to tell the president, wasn’t it big enough to do something about? He says, Well, I couldn’t get the photos. I say, You’re secretary of defense. Somebody in the building who works for you has photos, and for five months you can’t get photos—hello?
Lawrence Wilkerson: The twin pressures were from Rumsfeld, and they were: Produce intelligence, and the gloves are off. That’s the communication that went down to the field.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: When Abu Ghraib happened, I was like, We’ve got to fire Rumsfeld. Like if we’re the “accountability president,” we haven’t really done this. We don’t veto any bills. We don’t fire anybody. I was like, Well, this is a disaster, and we’re going to hold some National Guard colonel responsible? This guy’s got to get fired.
For an M.B.A. president, he got the M.B.A. 101 stuff down, which is, you know, you don’t have to do everything. Let other people do it. But M.B.A. 201 is: Hold people accountable.
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: We were there in Washington for a G-8 meeting, and Colin suddenly phoned us all up and said, We’re going to the White House this morning. Now, this is curious, because normally the heads of government don’t give a damn about foreign ministers. We all popped in a bus and went over and were cordially received by Colin and President Bush. The president sat down to explain that, you know, this terrible news had come out about Abu Ghraib and how disgusting it was. The thrust of his presentation was that this was a terrible aberration; it was un-American conduct. This was not American.
Joschka Fischer was one of the people that said, Mr. President, if the atmosphere at the top is such that it encourages or allows people to believe that they can behave this way, this is going to be a consequence. The president’s reaction was: This is un-American. Americans don’t do this. People will realize Americans don’t do this.
The problem for the United States, and indeed for the free world, is that because of this—Guantánamo, and the “torture memos” from the White House, which we were unaware of at that time—people around the world don’t believe that anymore. They say, No, Americans are capable of doing such things and have done them, all the while hypocritically criticizing the human-rights records of others.
Alberto Mora, navy general counsel: I will tell you this: I will tell you that General Anthony Taguba, who investigated Abu Ghraib, feels now that the proximate cause of Abu Ghraib were the O.L.C. memoranda that authorized abusive treatment. And I will also tell you that there are general-rank officers who’ve had senior responsibility within the Joint Staff or counterterrorism operations who believe that the number-one and number-two leading causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been, number one, Abu Ghraib, number two, Guantánamo, because of the effectiveness of these symbols in helping recruit jihadists into the field and combat against American soldiers.
July 22, 2004 The bipartisan 9/11 commission—whose creation was fiercely opposed by the administration—issues its report. It provides a detailed reconstruction of events leading up to the attacks, and of the attacks themselves; an earlier staff report found “no credible evidence” of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The final report also determines that many warning signs of an impending attack were ignored.
Lawrence Wilkerson: John [Bellinger] and I had to work on the 9/11-commission testimony of Condi. Condi was not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna do it, and then all of a sudden she realized she better do it. That was an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the president had been actually concerned about al-Qaeda. We cherry-picked things to make it look as if the vice president and others, Secretary Rumsfeld and all, had been.
They didn’t give a shit about al-Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: Intelligence reform was our big recommendation. The principal conclusion we reached was that the 15 or 16 agencies of the intelligence community did not share information and that there had to be some mechanism put in place to force the sharing of information. In the intelligence business, you don’t get, or you usually don’t get, information saying that the terrorists are going to strike at nine in the morning in the World Trade towers in New York City on September 11. You get bits and pieces of information that have to be put together.
We knew, for example—when I say we, I mean the F.B.I. in Minneapolis knew—that those guys in flight-training school were more interested in flying the airplane than they were in taking off and landing. They knew that. Who didn’t know it? The director of the F.B.I. didn’t know it. The director of the C.I.A. did know it. His response was that it was none of his business. Technically correct, because his business is foreign intelligence.
That’s one of many, many examples.
November 2, 2004 Election Day. Bush defeats Kerry by a margin of three million popular votes and 35 electoral votes. In a press conference two days later Bush says, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I now intend to spend it. It is my style.”
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: The interesting thing about both Bush campaigns is that they strategically defied conventional wisdom and turned it on its head. In 1999, on the old “right track, wrong track” question, which we ask on every poll—the reason we ask it is because it determines whether or not it’s a change environment or a status-quo environment—in 1999, the “right track” was 65 percent or 70 percent, which under conventional wisdom would indicate that it was a great environment for the Democrats and for Al Gore. The strategic challenge we had was—we were in the position of trying to argue everything’s great, so it’s time for a change, right?
Flash forward to 2004. It’s just the opposite. This time, the “wrong track” is like 65 or 70 percent. We’re in a very difficult war, uncertain economy, and so now we’re in the strategic position of saying, you know, everything’s all screwed up. Stay the course. We’re all f’d up. Stay the course.
November 15, 2004 Colin Powell announces his resignation as secretary of state. He is succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, who will in time have limited success charting a new direction on issues such as Iran and North Korea.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: I’m not sure even to this day that he’s willing to admit to himself that he was rolled to the extent that he was. And he’s got plenty of defense to marshal because, as I told [former defense secretary] Bill Perry one time when Bill asked me to defend my boss—I said, Well, let me tell you, you wouldn’t have wanted to have seen the first Bush administration without Colin Powell. I wrote Powell a memo about six months before we were leaving, and I said, This is your legacy, Mr. Secretary: damage control. He didn’t like it much. In fact, he kind of handed it back to me and told me I could put it in the burn basket.
But I knew he understood what I was saying. You saved the China relationship. You saved the transatlantic relationship and each component thereof—France, Germany. I mean, he held Joschka Fischer’s hand under the table on occasions when Joschka would say something like, You know, your president called my boss a fucking asshole. His task became essentially cleaning the dogshit off the carpet in the Oval Office. And he did that rather well. But it became all-consuming.
I think the clearest indication I got that Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.
Charles Duelfer, U.N. and U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq: You thought you had the dream team of foreign-policy experts, but they weren’t a team at all. Some of the wags over at the Department of Defense would call John Bolton’s office over at State the “American Interests Section.” Very funny, but it showed you how badly divided this administration had become.
Lawrence Wilkerson: The imbalance is huge. The Pentagon now gets three quarters of a trillion dollars every year and State gets $35 billion. Rumsfeld remarked one time, I lose more money than you get. He has two and a half million men. State is not even a combat brigade, you know?
Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister and later defense minister: We came out of our meeting, and our nato ambassador said, “Oh, Mr. Rumsfeld was really quite cordial and animated today.” And [one of our generals], his remark was something like: Oh, he’s sort of like, it’s like a snake on a hot summer day sleeping on the road in the sun. If an eyelid flickers, you say it’s very animated.
December 26, 2004 An undersea earthquake off the western coast of Sumatra—the second-largest earthquake ever recorded—unleashes a wave of tsunamis throughout the Indian Ocean, killing more than 200,000 people. Bush orders the U.S. Navy to spearhead emergency relief efforts, which are widely praised. Distracted elsewhere, the administration’s Asian initiatives are otherwise few. There is one clear beneficiary.
Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations: The Chinese never said so, because they are the best geopolitical strategists in the world, but it was immediately obvious that with 9/11 the U.S.-China relationship improved. The Chinese were smart. They didn’t put any real obstacles in the way of action in Afghanistan, and even if they strongly opposed the war in Iraq, they did so in a way that minimized the difficulties for the U.S. I saw that firsthand, in the period after the invasion was over, when the U.S. needed a Security Council resolution to get the oil sales flowing again. They got the resolution, and I remember asking a U.S. diplomat which country had been most helpful in getting the resolution passed. China, he replied. That 2003 resolution was a double win for the Chinese leaders: they obtained valuable political goodwill from the Bush administration, which translated into gains on the Taiwan issues, and they helped to ensure that American troops would remain bogged down in Iraq for a long time.
The Chinese have been brilliant in playing the Bush years. Asia is one part of the world where many will see George Bush in a positive light, although not necessarily for the reasons he may have wished.
February 2, 2005 In his State of the Union address, Bush starts spending his political capital with a plan to take the Social Security system in the direction of privatization by allowing individuals to divert payments to their own retirement accounts. The partial-privatization scheme is widely opposed—the public sees reliable benefits at risk—and in the end the proposal goes nowhere. Meanwhile, despite significant turnout by Evangelicals in the election, faith-based initiatives make little headway on the president’s agenda.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: After the 2004 election they cut the White House faith-based staff by 30 percent, 40 percent, because it became clear that it had served its purpose.
There’s this idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of religious conservatives. But what people miss is that religious conservatives and the Republican Party have always had a very uneasy relationship. The reality in the White House is—if you look at the most senior staff—you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders. Now, at the end of the day, that’s easy to understand, because most of the people who are religious-right leaders are not easy to like. It’s that old Gandhi thing, right? I might actually be a Christian myself, except for the action of Christians.
And so in the political-affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at everyone from Rich Cizik, who is one of the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals, to James Dobson, to basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.
June 7, 2005 Documents emerge indicating that the decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, in 2001, was influenced by the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group with ties to Exxon. One State Department letter to the coalition states: “Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you.” Several days later, Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist and the chief of staff of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, resigns after it is revealed that he had edited government reports to downplay the threat of climate change. Cooney takes a job at Exxon.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: In the fall of 2002, I was doing something I’d been doing for years, which was developing and editing the [Climate Change Science Program’s] annual report to Congress. And it had been drafted with input from dozens of federal scientists and reviewed and vetted and revised and vetted some more.
And then it had to go for a White House clearance. It came back to us over the fax machine with Phil Cooney’s hand markup on it. I flipped through it and saw right away what he was doing. You don’t need to do a huge amount of re-writing to make something say something different; you just need to change a word, change a phrase, cross out a sentence, add some adjectives. And what he was doing was, he was passing a screen over the report to introduce uncertainty language into statements about global warming. The political motivation of it was obvious.
June 24, 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president of Iran, a country whose regional sway has been enhanced by the implosion of neighboring Iraq under U.S. occupation. Iran steps up its efforts to enrich uranium, and Bush states more than once that he will not rule out the use of force if Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: The big problem was that the administration was in a permanent state of denial—that they are doing the job for Tehran. That’s another irony, a very tragic one. Because if you look to the basic parameters of Iran’s capability or strategic strength, this is not a superpower—they’re far from a superpower. They never could have achieved such a level of dominance and influence if they would have had to rely only on their own resources and skills. America pushed Iran in that way.
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: In my experience of negotiations, about the worst you can do is to humiliate the other side. And I think that this is one error that has been with the U.S.—they reject any talk with Ahmadinejad because he is someone who is regarded as a rogue and playing to the galleries and so forth.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: I was in the Congress when we began talking to members of the Supreme Soviet under the old Soviet Union. I’d get up and give a speech. My Soviet counterpart would get up and give a speech. Then we’d toast each other with vodka and say that we were for peace in the world and prosperity for our grandchildren, and then we’d go home. And we did that year after year after year. After doing it 10 or 15 years, we put aside the speeches and we began to talk with one another. That was the beginning of the thaw.
It might not take 40 years with the Iranians, but it’s going to take a long time. You’re going to have to have patience. You have to put on the table not just our agenda but their agenda as well. But the conversation is critical, and I don’t know how you deal with differences without talking to people. If you know a way to solve problems without talking to people, let me know, because I haven’t found out about it yet.
August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded, strikes the Gulf Coast. The storm surge breaches the levees in New Orleans; the city is flooded and eventually evacuated amid a complete breakdown of civil order. Bush flies over the city on his way back from a fund-raiser out West. Days later, visiting the destruction as relief efforts falter, the president praises the fema director, Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
Bush vows to rebuild New Orleans, and Brown, whose performance is widely criticized, is effectively fired; the president’s approval rating sinks to 39 percent. Three years after Katrina the population of New Orleans will have dropped by one-third. The city’s defenses against storms and floods will remain a vulnerable patchwork.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter. I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.
Michael Brown, director of fema, which becomes part of the Department of Homeland Security: There were two things that went wrong with Katrina. One is personal on my part. I failed after having briefed the president about how bad things were in New Orleans and telling him that I needed the Cabinet to stand up and pay attention. When that didn’t happen, I should’ve leveled with the American public instead of sticking to those typical political talking points about—how we’re working as a team and we’re doing everything we can. I should’ve said this thing is just not working. Probably would’ve been fired anyway, but at least it would’ve caused the federal government to stand up and get off their butts.
The second thing that happened was this. [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff inserted himself into the response, and suddenly I had this massive bureaucracy on top of me. I should have basically told Chertoff to kiss off, that I would continue to deal directly with the president. But he’s the new kid on the block and the White House deferred to him, and it gave me no choice but to work through him, which then scoped things down and caused it to just completely implode on itself.
Lee Hamilton, former Indiana congressman and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission: When you have a disaster strike, you have to have someone in charge. They didn’t have anybody in charge in New York during 9/11. They didn’t have anybody in charge in Katrina. And you get a mess.
Politically it’s a very difficult thing. You’ve got the counties, the cities, and the federal government and all the rest to work it out. Nobody wants to give up authority prior to the fact. The governor of Louisiana wants to be in charge. The governor of Mississippi wants to be in charge. The mayor of New Orleans wants to be in charge. You’ve got 50 other cities that want to be in charge. I have come to the view in these massive disasters—like Katrina or New York on 9/11—that the federal government has to be in charge because they’re the only one that has the resources to deal with the problem.
But presidents don’t like to stomp on governors and override them. When these kinds of problems are not resolved, people die.
December 6, 2005 nasa scientist James Hansen gives a lecture on climate change at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in San Francisco. nasa reacts by ordering his future public statements to be vetted in advance. Earlier in the year Rick Piltz had resigned from the Climate Change Science Program over other instances of political interference.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: To me, the central climate-science scandal of the Bush administration was the suppression of the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts report. In the 1997–2000 time frame, the White House had directed the Global Change Research Program to develop a scientifically based assessment of the implications of climate change for the United States. It was a vulnerability assessment: If these projected warming models are correct, what’s going to happen? And over a period of several years a team made up of eminent scientists and other experts produced a major report. To this day, it remains the most comprehensive effort to understand the implications of global warming for the United States.
And the administration killed that study. They directed federal agencies not to make any reference to the existence of it in any further reports. Through a series of deletions it was completely excised from all program reports from 2002 onward. It was left up on a Web site. There was a lawsuit filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is an ExxonMobil-funded “denialist” group, demanding that the report be deleted from the Web. Myron Ebell of the institute said, Our goal is to make that report vanish.
December 16, 2005 The New York Times reveals the existence of a massive warrantless-surveillance program conducted on American soil. Bush contends that the September 2001 war-on-terror authorization by Congress—“to use all necessary and appropriate force” against relevant “nations, organizations, and persons”—effectively gives the president unlimited power to act. Other kinds of snooping occur inside the administration.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.
December 30, 2005 Bush signs into law the Detainee Treatment Act. The legislation was passed by Congress in order to prohibit the inhumane treatment of prisoners, but Bush appends a “signing statement” laying out his own interpretation and indicating that he is not otherwise bound by the law in any meaningful way. This is one of more than 800 instances in which Bush deploys signing statements to finesse congressional intent.
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: Every president in war time and in crisis—Lincoln, Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, just to name three—exercised extraordinarily broad powers. They pushed the law and stretched the law and bent the law, and many people think they broke the law. And we’ve largely forgiven them for doing so because we think that they acted prudently in crisis. So Lincoln—he did all sorts of things after Fort Sumter. He spent unappropriated moneys. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
Now, there’s a way of looking at the Cheney-Addington position on executive power which is not unlike some of the most extreme assertions of Lincoln and Roosevelt. But there are important differences. One is that both Lincoln and Roosevelt coupled this sense of a powerful executive in times of crisis with a powerful sense of a need to legitimate and justify the power through education, through legislation, through getting Congress on board, through paying attention to what one might call the “soft” values of constitutionalism. That was an attitude that Addington and I suppose Cheney just did not have.
The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.
June 29, 2006 The Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld rules that detainees at Guantánamo have rights under the Geneva Conventions, including fundamental rights of due process. Two months later, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who had been held at Guantánamo for nearly five years, will be released from custody and flown back to Germany.
John le Carré, novelist and former intelligence officer whose novel A Most Wanted Man was inspired by the Kurnaz case: Murat Kurnaz, a German-born-and-educated Turkish resident of Bremen, in northern Germany, by trade a shipbuilder, was released from Guantánamo on 24 August 2006 after four years and eight months without charge or trial. He was 24 years old. In December 2001, at the age of 19, he had been arrested in Pakistan, sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans for $3,000, and tortured for five weeks and nearly killed at an interrogation center in Kandahar before being flown in chains to Cuba. His family was first informed of his situation in January 2002. Despite repeated brutal treatment and repeated interrogation at Guantánamo, no evidence was found to link him with terrorist activities, a fact acknowledged by both U.S. and German intelligence. Yet it took years of intense lobbying by lawyers, family, and NGOs to secure his release.
Two weeks after Murat’s release, I was in Hamburg to take part in a television discussion on the anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on America. A woman journalist attached to the program had been assigned the task of looking after Murat while the program’s producers prepared a documentary about him. Would I like to meet him? I would, and spent two days listening to him in a hotel suite in Bremen. Despite a disgraceful campaign of innuendo orchestrated by the complicit German authorities, I shared the view of practically everyone who had met him that Murat was remarkably truthful and was a reliable witness to his own tragedy.
September 21, 2006 The Environmental Protection Agency declines to tighten regulations on annual emissions of soot.
November 7, 2006 The Republicans suffer a stinging defeat in the midterm elections; Democrats take control of both the House and Senate. The following day, Rumsfeld resigns as defense secretary. He is replaced by Robert Gates.
November 26, 2007 Secretary of State Rice convenes a Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The Bush administration had from the outset paid scant attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and attempts by Rice to revive the peace process come to little.
Anthony Cordesman, national-security analyst and former official at the Defense and State Departments: In reality, a great deal of what Secretary Rice did seems to have been based as much on a search for visibility as any expectation of real progress. The fact was that you did not have to contend with Chairman Arafat, but you did have to contend with a deeply divided Israel, which was far less willing to accept or make compromises over peace. And with the Palestinian movement, which was moving toward civil war. The United States can only make serious progress when both the Israelis and Palestinians are ready to move toward peace. Setting artificial deadlines and creating yet another set of unrealistic expectations did not lay the groundwork for sustained real progress. It instead created new sources of frustration and again made people throughout the Arab and Muslim world see the United States as hypocritical and ineffective.
December 6, 2006 The independent Iraq Study Group, chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issues a report setting out 79 recommendations for the future conduct of the Iraq war. The report is brushed aside by the president. Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the group’s members, says of Bush after the report is delivered, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”
Alan K. Simpson, former senator from Wyoming and a member of the Iraq Study Group: It was an early-morning session, seven a.m., I think, breakfast, the day we trotted it out. And Jim and Lee said, Mr. President, we will—and Dick was there, Cheney was there—just go around the room, if you would, and all of us share with you a quick thought? And the president said fine. I thought at first the president seemed a little—I don’t know, just maybe impatient, like, What now?
He went around the room. Everybody stated their case. It just took a couple minutes. I know what I said. I said, Mr. President, we’re not here to present this to vex or embarrass you in any way. That’s not the purpose of this. We’re in a tough, tough situation, and we think these recommendations can help the country out. We’ve agreed on every word here, and I hope you’ll give it your full attention. He said, Oh, I will. And I turned to Dick, and I said, Dick, old friend, I hope you’ll gnaw on this, too. This is very important that you hear this and review it. And he said, I will, I will, and thanks.
Then the president gave an address not too far after that. And we were called by [National-Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley on a conference call. He said, Thank you for the work. The president’s going to mention your report, and it’ll be—there will be parts of it that he will embrace, in fact, and if he doesn’t happen to speak on certain issues, you know that they’ll be in full consideration in the weeks to come, or something like that. And we all listened with a wry smile.
We figured that maybe 5 of the 79 recommendations would ever be considered, and I think we were pretty right.
Lee Hamilton: Cheney was there, never said a word, not a—of course, the recommendations from his point of view were awful, but he never criticized. Bush was very gracious, said we’ve worked hard and did this great service for the country—and he ignored it so far as I can see. He fundamentally didn’t agree with it. President Bush has always sought, still seeks today, a victory, military victory. And we did not recommend that. The gist of what we had to say was a responsible exit. He didn’t like that.
December 7, 2006 The Justice Department fires seven United States attorneys without explanation. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales calls the controversy an “overblown personnel matter,” but the legal battle over the firings plays out to this day as it becomes clear that the attorneys were fired for having insufficient partisan zeal. Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, and Karl Rove are cited for contempt of Congress when they refuse a summons by the House Judiciary Committee to discuss the firings.
David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in New Mexico and one of the fired prosecutors: When I got the phone call, on Pearl Harbor Day, it came completely out of the blue. Mike Battle, the head of the executive office of U.S. attorneys, said very directly, Look, you know, we want to go a different way, and we’d like you to submit your resignation by the end of next month. I said, What’s going on? Mike said, I don’t know, I don’t want to know. All I know is that this came from on high.
I knew that U.S. attorneys were only asked to resign essentially for misconduct, and I knew I hadn’t committed any misconduct. I knew my office was doing well by the Justice Department’s internal metrics. Logically that only left one possibility, which was politics.
I started thinking back to, well, Who within the party have I angered? The first thing that came to mind were two very inappropriate phone calls that I got in October 2006. One was from Congresswoman Heather Wilson. She called me directly on my cell phone and was snooping around, asking about sealed indictments. I was very vague in my answer and basically gave her reasons why U.S. attorneys can seal something. She seemed very unsatisfied.
Approximately two weeks later, I got a second phone call. This one was from Pete Domenici, who had been my sponsoring senator, and he called me at home. He started asking about the political-corruption cases [against Democrats] and matters he’d been reading about in the local media. He just came out and asked me point-blank, Are these going to get filed prior to November?, and I was absolutely stunned by that question. I tried to be responsive without violating any regulations or rules myself, and I told him I didn’t think so. At which point he said, I’m very sorry to hear that, and then he hung up the phone. I had a very sick sense in my stomach.
December 20, 2006 In a news conference Bush states that the year ahead will “require difficult choices and additional sacrifices.” Noting that it is important to maintain economic growth, he adds, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”
January 10, 2007 Bush announces a surge in American troop strength in Iraq, from 130,000 to more than 150,000. The aim is to suppress the level of violence and overt sectarian strife and thus to provide a breathing spell in which the Iraqi government can make progress toward a set of stated political benchmarks. By fall the level of violence has indeed subsided—observers disagree on why—though many of the political benchmarks remain unmet.
Anthony Cordesman, national-security analyst and former official at the Defense and State Departments: We can all argue over the semantics of the word “surge,” and it is fair to say that some goals were not met. We didn’t come close to providing additional civilian-aid workers that were called for in the original plan. And often it took much longer to achieve the effects than people had planned. But the fact was that this was a broad political, military, and economic strategy, which was executed on many different levels. And credit has to go to General Petraeus, General Odierno, and Ambassador Crocker for taking what often were ideas, very loosely defined, and policies which were very broadly stated, and transforming them into a remarkably effective real-world effort.
It’s important to note that we made even more mistakes in Afghanistan than we did in Iraq. We were far slower to react, but in both cases we were unprepared for stability operations; we had totally unrealistic goals for nation building; at a political level we were in a state of denial about the seriousness of popular anger and resistance, about the rise of the insurgency, about the need for host-country support and forces; and we had a singularly unfortunate combination of a secretary of defense and a vice president who tried to win through ideology rather than realism and a secretary of state who essentially stood aside from many of the issues involved. And in fairness, rather than blame subordinates, you had a president who basically took until late 2006 to understand how much trouble he was in in Iraq and seems to have taken till late 2008 to understand how much trouble he was in in Afghanistan.
June 28, 2007 Bush’s immigration plan, a bipartisan effort that represents the most ambitious attempt to overhaul U.S. immigration policy in a generation, goes down to defeat in the Senate. The most controversial element is a provision that would permit an estimated 12 million illegal aliens already in the United States to take steps to legalize their status, with citizenship an eventual possibility. The provision enrages many in Bush’s own party, who call it amnesty and see it as a security threat.
Mark McKinnon, chief campaign media adviser to George W. Bush: My suspicion would be that that is a real regret [of the president’s]. It’s an issue we talked about early on in the 2000 campaign, and he was told by advisers that it was the third rail, or maybe the fourth rail—Social Security’s the third rail. But it’s also an issue that attracted people like me to him. Centrist types, independent types in Texas were attracted to him because he was a Republican who was talking about a limited yet appropriate role for government on issues like education and immigration. Immigration was one of his most heartfelt issues.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: The repercussions of that decision by our party are going to be felt for decades. As I sit here in Austin, I see the demographic changes that are happening in our state—in less than 20 years, Hispanics are going to be a majority of the population. And we are on the wrong side of that issue. It’s that simple.
January 1, 2008 As the new year begins, the United States is faced with an accelerating economic crisis. The price of oil will soon top $100 a barrel for the first time in history, driven by rising demand in the developed world and in India and China—and by the prospect of continuing Middle Eastern uncertainties. Although the fact will not be established for another year, when the National Bureau of Economic Research issues its December 2008 report, the U.S. economy has entered a recession.
The catalyzing event is the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. During the past 12 months there have been nearly 1.3 million foreclosure filings. The losses flow upward. In March, J. P. Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide massive emergency loans to prevent a default by Bear Stearns, one of the nation’s largest financial institutions; Bear Stearns is ultimately absorbed by J. P. Morgan. A cascade of economic woe ensues.
Some regulators had been warning for years about the threat posed by bad mortgages and the housing market, but steps to tighten the rules were successfully opposed by lenders.
Robert Shiller, Yale economist who warned of a housing bubble: The Bush strategists were aware of the public enthusiasm for housing, and they dealt with it brilliantly in the 2004 election by making the theme of the campaign the ownership society. Part of the ownership society seemed to be that the government would encourage home ownership and, therefore, boost the market. And so Bush was playing along with the bubble in some subtle sense. I don’t mean to accuse him of any—I think it probably sounded right to him, and the political strategists knew what was a good winning combination.
I don’t think that he was in any mode to entertain the possibility that this was a bubble. Why should he do that? Attention wasn’t even focused on this. If you go back to 2004, most people were just—they thought that we had discovered a law of nature: that housing, because of the fixity of land and the growing economy and the greater prosperity, that it’s inevitable that this would be a great investment. It was taken for granted.
John C. Dugan, comptroller of the currency A lot of mortgages got made to people who could not afford them and on terms that would get progressively worse over time, and that created the seeds of an even bigger problem. As the whole market became even more dependent on house-price appreciation, when house prices flattened and then started to decline the whole situation began to unravel. The question you have to ask yourself: Why did credit become so easy? Why would lenders make mortgages that became increasingly less likely to be repaid?
Part of the answer is that there was a huge chunk of the mortgage market that was not regulated to any significant extent. The overwhelming proportion of subprime loans were being done in entities that were not banks and not regulated as banks—I’m talking here about mortgage brokers and non-bank mortgage lenders that could originate these mortgages and then sell them to Wall Street firms that could package them into new kinds of mortgage securities, which arguably could take into account the lower credit risks and still be salable to investors worldwide.
Unfortunately, the theory was not in accord with the reality. Although they thought they had accurately gauged that risk, they too were in fact depending—when you get to the bottom of it—on house prices continuing to go up and up and up. And they did not.
Henry Paulson, secretary of the Treasury: I easily could imagine and expected there to be financial turmoil. But the extent of it, O.K., I was naïve in terms of—I knew a lot about regulation but not nearly as much as I needed to know, and I knew very little about regulatory powers and authorities. I just had not gone into it in that kind of detail. This’ll be the longest we’ve gone in recent history without there being turmoil, and given all the innovation in the private pools of capital and the over-the-counter derivatives and the excesses around the world, we figured that when there was turmoil, and these things were tested for the first time by stress, it would be more significant than anything else.
I said at the time, I have a concern that every rally we’re going to have in the financial markets will be a false rally until we break the back of the price correction in real estate. And these things are never over until you have a couple of institutions go that surprise everyone. Bear Stearns can hardly be a shock.
But having said that, it’s one thing to see it intellectually and it’s another to see where we are.
June 12, 2008 The Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush strikes down a provision in the Military Commissions Act, ruling that the denial of the right to petition for habeas corpus is unconstitutional.
July 9, 2008 The annual summit of the G-8 nations, held in Japan, concludes with a tepid pledge to cut greenhouse gases by 50 percent by the year 2050. It is the last G-8 summit that Bush attends. He bids farewell to the other heads of state with the words “Good-bye from the world’s greatest polluter.”
July 30, 2008 As the subprime-mortgage crisis continues to ripple through the economy, Bush signs emergency legislation to rescue the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A Wall Street bailout will follow in October. The budget deficit for the year is expected to exceed $1 trillion.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first White House press secretary: [The housing bubble] was not on my radar screen. Now, after everything broke with Fannie and Freddie, I guess the White House released some document that, if I remember it, said the president 17 times cited Fannie and Freddie problems going back to the initial budget that we submitted in 2001. So the wonks were onto it, but in the post-9/11 world and then the Iraq-war world, all the visible focus, all the news, was on other issues. I think it just got drowned out and it didn’t get met with any sense of urgency from people in both parties.
August 8, 2008 Russia invades the Republic of Georgia. Bush says in a Rose Garden appearance that the United States “stands with” Georgia. Bush makes his comments during a brief stop in Washington between a trip to Beijing for the Olympics and a vacation at his ranch in Crawford. Since taking office Bush has spent more than 450 days at the Crawford ranch and more than 450 days at Camp David. During the last six months of his presidency, Bush is largely absent from public view, even as the economic crisis continues to build.
September 1, 2008 Republicans meet in St. Paul to nominate John McCain as their presidential candidate; with an approval rating in the polls hovering below 30 percent, Bush becomes the first sitting president since Lyndon Johnson not to appear at his own party’s nominating convention. (He had been scheduled to attend, but his appearance was canceled when a hurricane once again threatened the Gulf Coast.) The president travels to Gettysburg for a tour of the battlefield, accompanied by his wife, Laura, and a number of former aides—Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Harriet Miers. Among the guides are Gabor Boritt, a Lincoln scholar, and his son Jake Boritt, a filmmaker.
Jake Boritt, filmmaker and Gettysburg tour guide: We’re standing in front of the Virginia monument, which is more or less where Robert E. Lee ordered Pickett’s Charge from. When Lee invaded the North, his hope was that he could get far enough in, win a great battle, demoralize the Northern will to fight, and then there would be pressure on Lincoln to stop the war. Everybody in the North was terrified. Lincoln was not. He was looking at it as an opportunity, because finally Lee was going to be off his home turf in Virginia. Lincoln was actually excited at the possibility that the Confederate Army was invading Pennsylvania. And Bush said, Well, did the president say, “Bring it on”?
We do this one thing where you line people up shoulder to shoulder to show how the Confederates moved across a mile-long field to attack the Union line. So we lined them up—it was roughly 20 people, all mostly important White House people, and you’re pretending you’re shooting at ‘em with cannon shells as you pretend to take them out.
October 3, 2008 After much wrangling, and with a sense of urgency and dismay, Congress passes the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which authorizes the secretary of the Treasury to spend $700 billion to shore up U.S. financial institutions and otherwise address the fallout from the subprime-mortgage crisis.
Eric Cantor, G.O.P. congressman from Virginia and Republican chief deputy whip: It was almost as if panic had struck the capital. When the news came out about how dire the situation was, not only for the U.S. capital markets but for the global financial scene, [there was real worry that] all the sort of nightmare scenarios that one learned in school could actually be occurring. I was a little bit concerned, though, about the haste with which the administration was moving, given the enormity of the package that they were proposing to bring to the Hill in a matter of days. The amount of money was so gargantuan—more than what Social Security spends in a year. It was really unheard of. In hindsight I can see now that the panic was such that they felt they needed to do whatever was possible to make sure that we did not have a repeat of the Great Depression. I felt like the weight of the world and the weight of the national economy and the well-being of every family across this country was resting on our shoulders. The level of anxiety and panic found on the face of Secretary Paulson, [Federal Reserve Board] Chairman [Ben] Bernanke—you could see in person that it was severe. I do not think that anyone foresaw the level of seriousness of the problem we were faced with.
November 4, 2008 Barack Obama is elected president in an electoral-college landslide. The Republicans lose at least seven seats in the Senate and a score in the House, dashing Karl Rove’s hopes of a permanent Republican majority. As the administration prepares to leave office, it promulgates a raft of “midnight” orders to weaken environmental, health-care, and product-safety regulations. The unemployment rate is nearly 7 percent and rising. Income inequality is at the highest level since the 1920s. As of a week before the election, the stock market had lost a third of its value over a period of six months.

Revisit the first draft of history with our Bush-administration archive, “Mission Unaccomplished.” Illustration by Risko.
Ed Gillespie, campaign strategist and later counselor to the president: Politics goes in cycles, and my old boss, [Mississippi governor] Haley Barbour, who was a mentor to me, has a saying that in politics nothing’s ever as good or as bad as it seems.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: At the end of the day I think the divisiveness of this presidency will fundamentally come down to one issue: Iraq. And Iraq only because, in my opinion, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. I think the public’s tolerance for the difficulties we face would’ve been far different had it felt like the original threat had been proved true. That’s the fulcrum. Fundamentally, when the president gets to an approval rating of 27 percent, it’s this issue.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited.
Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: One of our difficulties now is getting the rest of the world to accept our assessment of the seriousness of an issue, because they say, You screwed it up so badly with Iraq, why would we believe that you’re any better today? And it’s a damn hard question to answer.
Meanwhile, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have relocated, have strengthened, have become a more nimble and a much more international organization. The threat is greater today than it was on September the 11th.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: It’s kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there’s going to be a permanent Republican majority—that God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so.
Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: You know, the headline in his presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It’s missed opportunity, missed opportunity.
Cullen Murphy is Vanity Fair’s editor-at-large.
Todd S. Purdum is Vanity Fair’s national editor.
Philippe Sands is an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London.

Great Expectations
Arguments of 2009: how much time does Barack Obama have to deliver?
(London Times Editorial)
The question is which will come the sooner: inauguration or the first claims of betrayal? Barack Obama took wing on the back of imprecise hopes beautifully expressed. But an asset in a campaign can be a liability in office. This is not to repeat the claim that the new president lacks substance or detail - he lacks neither. The experience and intelligence of the team he is assembling shows, on the President-elect's part, great political maturity. He has signalled his will be a centrist administration in which talent will matter more than prior rivalry.
The problem is that the Obama campaign worked on the basis that people projected on to the candidate their own definition of change. The great disillusionment generated by his predecessor melted into a pleasing account of the dawn to come. The Obama texts rarely disclosed much more than the hope that things can only get better. Meanwhile, every vocal supporter has a private definition of success, which will now begin to infiltrate the public debate. As Yogi Berra once said: “You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.” The chorus of disapproval is tuning up, off stage left. If the new president is held to the letter of his stated desire for energy independence and serious progress on climate change, he is bound to fall short. It would require an implausible sequence of international co-operation and changes to the habits of the American people to get very far within the limit of a term in office. “Climate is what we expect,” said Mark Twain, “weather is what we get”.
The appointment of Arne Duncan, the reforming chief of the Chicago schools system, shows that Obama's anti-reform campaign stance was a pose to win over the teaching unions, which will now be quick to cry foul. The Democratic primary campaign was also thick with detailed health plans. Every Democrat worth the party card imagines the day when the United States ceases to be the only wealthy industrialised nation that does not have a universal healthcare system. That it manages to spend 16 per cent of GDP not having one is quite a feat. Progress in covering the 47 million people who currently have no health plan will be monitored closely. But progress is likely to be slow. Health reform is exactly the kind of issue on which political capital is spent. It will need the aura of goodwill around President Obama to last.
Hillary Clinton, the new secretary of state, knows only too well the difficulties of health reform. She may not find her new post much easier. US foreign policy is the point at which foreign observers feel permitted to be disappointed too. The international joy at Senator Obama's victory has already brought the world closer together. But, once again, this optimism trails a series of irreconcilable hopes. The real issues of the hour - talking to terrorists, the precarious Middle East, the ambitions of Russia, a strategy for dealing with Iran, a surge in Afghanistan - will require compromise, diplomatic chicanery and, sometimes, at least the threat of belligerence.
Not much of the dirty business of politics was priced into the hope that greeted the election of the president who inherits these problems. Let us hope that judgment does not set in too soon. President Obama may disappoint us, but not yet.