A book written by former US President George W. Bush and titled “Decision Points” is ready for release next week. The release of the book will be preceded on November 8 by a prime-time hour-long interview with the NBC TV channel.
Since the 44th US President Barack Obama was sworn in on January 20, 2009, his predecessor basically disappeared from the limelight, living quietly in Texas. Only once, in January 2010 he reappeared on the front pages and in the prime-time, when a devastating earthquake hit Haiti and Barack Obama summoned all his predecessors to the White House in order to work out a program of help. After that, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton set up The Bush - Clinton Haiti Fund and both personally visited the earthquake-hit island.
But even at that short period of media attention, Bush carefully avoided any attempts to make him comment on political issues. He abstained from any criticism of Obama’s administration, even though Barack Obama himself had continuously blamed Bush for the difficult economic situation the country found itself in.
The ex-president avoiding any kind of political talk was easily explainable. He left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any US president. The whole electoral campaign of 2008 was not so much pro-Obama as anti-Bush. The very slogan that brought Obama to the White House, “Change We Can Believe In” was clearly targeting the outgoing Republican administration.
Now, Bush is back in the limelight, and this time with an obviously political message.
The date of the release of Bush’s memoir was announced a long time ago, when news of him working on it first appeared in early 2009. But it is hardly accidental that the release of the book coincided with the decisive Republican victory at the midterm Congressional elections. When the majority of Americans have turned their backs on their one-time idol and hero Obama, it is probably the best time for Bush to shed more favorable light on the time of his presidency.
Anyway, he keeps to his principle of not criticizing the acting President. Instead, Bush focuses on his own failures and achievements. He still stands firm on defending the invasion of Iraq in 2003, although he admits that he was disappointed when no weapons of mass destruction were found there. "No one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons," he writes. "I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."
Bush also admits that he made mistakes when responding to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and felt "like the captain of a sinking ship" seeing the erupting economic crisis in 2008.
But what attracted the closest media attention in Bush’ book, is the narration dealing with his relationship with second-in-command, Vice President Dick Cheney. The common perception always was and still is that it was Cheney who really masterminded the US policies, while Bush was only following his directives. George W. has made it clear that one of the motives of writing the book was an intention to dispel the myths about Mr. Cheney’s power in the White House and “demonstrate that I was in charge.”
He even relates a story that before the presidential campaign of 2004 he seriously thought about dropping Dick Cheney from the reelection ticket, replacing him with Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee. But after carefully considering the matter, he decided against it. “I hadn’t picked him to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job,” writes the ex-president. “That was exactly what he had done.”
At the same time, Bush allows himself to pique Dick Cheney calling him “the Darth Vader of the administration” (referring to the commander of the Dark Forces in the “Star Wars” series). And even though he attributes this epithet to “The media and the left”, the wording hardly conceals his irritation.
In fact, the very section of the book that attracted the most media attention seems the least convincing part of the memoir. The public is still deeply convinced that the real “man in charge” in the White House in 2001-2008 was not President George W. Bush, but Vice President Dick Cheney.
On-line media publications are full of caustic comments by bloggers about the relationship between the two. Some of them cannot even be quoted here. But the general picture is such that Bush has hardly attained his purpose of making readers believe that it was he who took the most important decision during his tenure.
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