George W. Bush: Barack Obama’s Best Friend in the 2012 Election

Some political writers such as the author of a piece in The Daily Beast believe that Barack Obama has a recurring gift in his re-election bid: George W. Bush, a/k/a the Chimperator at this blog. Bush's disastrous eight years are a period that most Americans outside of heavy Kool-Aid drinkers would just as soon forget. The Bush/Cheney administration authored the fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan and took a national surplus and turned it into a crushing deficit. The Chimperator and his crowd also did much to further empower the religious extremists who now make up so much of the current GOP base. Needless to say, Republicans would like to pretend that the Bush/Cheney years never existed. Democrats, however, need to make sure that the Chimperator's years of misrule remain a part of the political discourse as we head into the 2012 general election. Here are some column highlights:

So George W. Bush, reports Politico, is laying low these days, avoiding the spotlight that shone briefly on his father and his brother Jeb recently as they endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy. This whole subject of the post-Bush GOP and its relationship to No. 43 is pretty fascinating. Like a crazy, drunk uncle shooting an epileptic dog because he has fleas, the current GOP shuns him for all the wrong reasons. Since the GOP will presumably spend the next few months trying to pretend the man never existed, Democrats ought to remind people that he did. In fact, the Democratic Party should spend the next 20 years talking about Bush, turning him into the new Jimmy Carter and making the memory of those eight squalid years quadrennially fresh to everyone with living memory of them for as long as is humanly possible.

[P]eople should know that the economy didn’t exactly boom from 2002 to 2008, except of course for the 1 percent of the population the policies were designed to aid. Bush’s job-growth record was the worst of any president going back to the Depression. The table you can see here goes back to Truman. Obviously, Roosevelt grew jobs at a fairly significant rate, since unemployment under him went from 24 percent to essentially zero during the height of the war. So you have to go back, I’d suppose, to Herbert Hoover to find someone who did worse than Bush’s .01 percent growth in jobs per year.

A poll released only last week from CNN showed 56 percent blame Bush, while just 29 percent finger Obama. The fact that we’re still clawing our way out of the darkness that Bush set upon us is the reason he is still relevant. Recently, Romney made him even more so, by insisting to an audience that it was Bush and Hank Paulson who actually saved the country from a depression.

Romney’s campaign staff and advisers are so full of Bush people—on political strategy, the economy, foreign policy, and other areas—that one former Bush speechwriter (who is not on the Romney bus) has called it “a restoration of the Bush establishment.”

Democrats really need to keep Bush in the frame here. And Dick Cheney. I know everyone says “but elections are about the future.” Well, maybe. But the Bush years were so uniquely bad, so plainly and emphatically horrible on so many fronts for such a vast majority of citizens, that to fail to mention the era would just be missing a free whack.

Bush really just stank up the joint for eight years. Mention him, and the pundit class might bray about it, but most people will react by thinking: Yeah, that guy really just stank up the joint for eight years.

[S]ome rich Texas buddies undoubtedly stand ready to pour millions into a PR-rehabilitation campaign when they sense the time is right, he can reemerge in the public eye, smirk intact, smiting Democrats like in the good old days of 2002. Democrats must make sure that that rehabilitation never, ever happens.