Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Nation

The opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, Texas, last week has led to a re-examination of the forty-third president’s legacy. An article in The Washington Post noted Bush’s approval rating has enjoyed a steady increase in the four years since he left office, attributing that spike to “the passage of time and Bush’s relative invisibility.” While that public invisibility has indeed been enjoyable, the library dedication should be an occasion to remember what it actually felt like in America during the Bush years. To take a tour through The Nation’s early judgments of Bush—before the wars, the cronyism, and the rejection of the rule of law brought such criticisms mainstream—is to be truly spoiled because there is so much to choose from, and there are many articles that deserve a second reading.

An early article on Bush’s first presidential campaign, “Running on Empty: The Truth About George W. Bush’s ‘Compassionate Conservatism,’ ” from April 1999, tried and failed to find a single way Bush had been compassionate to any constituency in Texas apart from his oil and gas industry cronies, arms manufacturers, polluters and other corporate malefactors. It also previewed Bush’s penchant for “speaking in tongues intended to be understood by the Christian right” and the regular-guy routine that became an important and effective component of his electoral strategy. “You think that if you could only forget the policies, the appointment and the vetoes, you could really love this guy,” Texas Observer editor Louis Dubose wrote. “He’s that good.”

An article published just before the 2000 election by David Corn, recent Polk Award winner and former Washington bureau chief for The Nation, considered the governor’s performance during the campaign—in which “Bush’s intelligence became a campaign issue”—and weighed the candidates’ respective closing arguments. “The dominant theme is, trust people, not the government,” Karl Rove told Corn. His boss’s own argument was more, well, succinct. “The greatness of America exists because our country is great,” Bush declared. At a certain point, one does feel a little nostalgic.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan Ryan has cited austerity research that was fundamentally flawed. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Gun-control advocate Robin Kelly's election to Congress may be the start of a broader shift in the political landscape. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)

The Senate’s defeat of common sense gun reforms made Wednesday a dark day—for sensible legislation, and for American democracy. The failure of an already-watered down background check compromise (55 senators backed reform; 45 sided with the NRA) revealed stunning political cowardice. And it illuminated once again the ugly fault lines of our corroded democracy—from the power of special and moneyed interests, to the stranglehold of small state bias (consider North Dakota, whose Democratic and Republican senators both sided with the NRA: the state gets one-fiftieth of our senators, despite having just over one five-hundredth of our population).

It is one of the underappreciated advantages of the digital age that when certain prominent people pass away, we need not be held captive to amnesiac, white-washing eulogies. So while President Obama lauds the late Margaret Thatcher as “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty,” it only takes a quick spin through The Nation’s archives to recall the magazine’s running critique of Thatcher and her ideology and, more generally, the great complexities in the folds of history now being steamed away.

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In 1980, before his move to the United States and to The Nation, Christopher Hitchens profiled life in his native Britain—scornfully dubbed “Maggie’s Farm”—after “one calendar year of neoconservative governance.” Following the economic and social policies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, Thatcher and her fellow Conservatives had begun to tear up the fabric of British life they claimed to be protecting: prices skyrocketed, services were drastically cut, and the rich received massive tax cuts, all in the name of restoring national greatness. “There are no reliable reports on whether or not this enhanced national pride has made the unemployed feel any better,” Hitchens quipped. “Nothing concentrates the mind like a little poverty,” as Hitchens quotes one Conservative official saying.