Review of Eric Alterman's and Mark Green's The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America

George Bush has many supporters. He also has many critics - on both sides of the political aisle. Some conservatives have raised concerns about Bush’s inability to trim domestic spending. They are alarmed over the large deficit. Others have questioned his moderate immigration policy. Many have commented on the allegedly intrusive nature of Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law. A few have even questioned the war in Iraq. In The American Conservative, for example, isolationist Patrick Buchanan has become increasingly vocal in his opposition to the war. In one recent editorial, Buchanan insisted that the crimes in Fallujah demonstrated that “once the cost in blood starts to rise, Americans tend to tell their government that enough is enough, put the Wilsonian idealism back on the shelf, and let’s get out.”

Most leftists also have serious problems with Bush, though they criticize him for different reasons. They believe his economic policies help the rich and hurt the poor. They believe he caters to the religious right. And they are convinced that Bush is an imperialist who has launched two costly and unnecessary wars. In comparison to right-wing critiques of the Bush administration, left-wing critiques are not only more numerous but also more strident and visceral. Bush is, after all, a conservative. Still, the level of animosity that leftists have for Bush is often beyond the pale of reasoned debate. In the New Republic, for example, Jonathan Chait has proudly written of his complete distaste for Bush’s policies and for his personality. “I hate,” Chait writes, “the way he walks - shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks - blustery self-assurance masked by pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him.” Clearly, the president should scratch Chait from the list of invitees to the next White House formal.

The left’s dislike of the president has spawned a cottage industry of anti-Bush books, from David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush to Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling. One of the latest efforts is Eric Alterman’s and Mark Green’s The Book on Bush. In 13 chapters and almost 400 pages, Alterman and Green contend that President Bush is a warmonger, a religious zealot, and a lackey of the rich. Bush, they write, “combines ideological extremism with intellectual laziness, and tops them off with serial dishonesty.” He is “messianic and radical.”

That Alterman and Green would write such a book should come as no surprise. Both authors have impeccable left-wing credentials. In the 1960s, Green came of age fighting against the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, he worked with modern day Narcissus Ralph Nader against corporate corruption. In the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote policy papers for Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton, and served as the elected Public Advocate for New York City. Three years ago, Green ran as a Democrat for mayor of the Big Apple. Despite a significant lead right up to the final weeks of the election, and a 5:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans, he failed to beat Republican Michael Bloomberg. Alterman, in turn, has used his regular column in the Nation magazine and his “Altercation” web log at msnbc.com to lampoon the war on terrorism. Two of his recent posts praised the electoral triumph of the Spanish socialists and their willingness to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Alterman has also authored the bestselling What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. In it, he argued that conservatives dominate the media and “control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore” - a curious position to adopt when one considers all the praise the media lavished on his book (“well-documented, even-tempered and witty” according to one paper, and “bold, counterintuitive, and cathartic” according to another).

Alterman’s and Green’s TheBook on Bush is a strident polemic that will only convince the already convinced. It fails to rise above the generally low level of argument that marks most of the anti-Bush books. It often reads like a musty encyclopedia. It provides little information, and certainly nothing new, about Bush’s background, his upbringing, and the central events of his life. It also incorporates just about every left-wing idea that exists. The extent of Alterman’s and Green’s failure can be illustrated by a consideration of four of their major charges: first, that Bush has set back the cause of civil rights; second, that the Bush administration’s education policy is a fraud; third, that its foreign policy is deceitful and aggressive; and fourth, that all Bush administration policies are motivated by a desire to please big business and right-wing extremists.

Alterman’s and Green’s first major charge is that President Bush has set back the cause of civil rights. They insist that Bush has little understanding of, or sympathy for, the problems confronting black Americans. To prove their point, they make a variety of allegations. They quote from NAACP chairman Julian Bond, who declared that Bush “and his party have long depended on attracting support from…[a] virulently racist minority element in their party.” They also contend that when Bush and fellow white conservative leaders discuss race relations, they have to “reach back a century and a half for faux inspiration” by invoking Abraham Lincoln’s name. They argue that when former Senate majority Trent Lott expressed support for Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist bid for the presidency, he was simply reflecting common GOP parlance. Most damning, they insist that Bush is “lacking any substantive policy in this area….”

Such charges are grossly unfair. Using the NAACP as an objective source to criticize the Bush administration is like asking a Red Sox fan to objectively evaluate the Yankees. The NAACP has opposed just about everything the Bush administration has done, including the war to liberate Iraq. Further, Alterman and Green fail to discuss the growing influence of such black conservative intellectuals as John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell – all of whom have very different opinions of Bush than they do. They are equally silent about the dozens of speeches in which President Bush has declared his profound admiration for the civil rights movement and numerous African American leaders. Finally, Alterman and Green should know that a central motivation behind NCLB is to give minority students an opportunity to achieve a quality education so that they can be successful in pursuit of their personal and professional goals. NCLB is, in Secretary of Education Rod Paige’s words, a “logical, next step to Brown v. Board of Education.”

But Alterman and Green don’t like NCLB. Their second major charge is that NCLB is a fraud. They repeat the National Education Association’s claim that the Bush administration has failed to fund education. “Think of a coach yelling at runners to sprint faster,” they write, “without providing sneakers. Or imagine daily testing of a race-car or an infantry battalion without spending adequately for tires and training.” Again, such charges are unfounded. Since he took office, Bush has increased funding for elementary and secondary education by almost 40 percent. Further, as education scholar Frederick Hess has pointed out, the U.S. consistently spends more money on education than all other industrialized nations. For primary education, on a per-pupil basis, the U.S. spends over 50 percent more than France, 60 percent more than Germany, and 80 percent more than Great Britain. More money, however, is meaningless unless schools can demonstrate that their kids are learning. In New Jersey and Washington, D.C., politicians have lavished money on urban schools, but with little result. President Bush understands this, and he realizes that the old, union-supported method of pouring money into schools while asking for nothing in return will not work. Alterman and Green do not understand this. They oppose NCLB’s mandated tests and other aspects of the law that would hold schools accountable to their students. They refuse to link teacher pay to student performance. And, unlike most African Americans, Alterman and Green oppose school choice, a position that effectively deprives black parents the freedom to choose the best school possible for their children, and prevents the public education system from facing the competition and incentive that could make it better.

Alterman’s and Green’s third major charge is that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is deceitful and aggressive. This charge also fails to convince, and the analysis Alterman and Green provide lacks balance. For example, they fault Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto treaty on global warming but have not a word to say about the Department of Energy’s estimate that implementation of the treaty would have reduced America’s GDP by 4 percent, or that China and India were exempted from the treaty. They criticize Bush for throwing aside “all the progress” the Clinton administration made in negotiating a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but totally ignore the fact that the goal of Clinton’s ally in those negotiations, the terrorist Yasser Arafat, was to destroy Israel - as is evidenced by his rejection of numerous Israeli offers. They praise the Clinton administration’s focus on terrorism when, in fact, Clinton did next to nothing to fight terrorism, and this despite the first attack on the World Trade Center as well as the bombings of the Khobar Towers, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole. They fault the Bush administration for America’s war in Afghanistan, but are totally silent about the monstrous Taliban regime. They see fit to lecture readers about the importance of the U.N., an organization with individuals who used the Oil-for-Food program to rob the Iraqi people of needed revenue, and an organization that grants Security Council vetoes to France, a third-rate military power, and to China, a communist dictatorship. Alterman and Green even cite their approval for Richard Rorty’s crackpot plan to repeal the U.S.’s Security Council veto while having the U.N. disarm America of all nuclear weapons! Such radical positions may warm the cockles of Noam Chomsky’s heart, but - thankfully - the American people would lend them no consideration.

Alterman and Green are at their worst when analyzing the Iraq War. The war, they argue, was unjust. It was a “costly and dangerous invasion” planned long in advance of 9/11 by neoconservatives - “one massive bait-and-switch-operation.” Most likely, Saddam did not have a weapons of mass destruction program or ties to al Qaeda and, in fighting the war, the Bush administration will promote even more terrorism.

Certainly, no stockpiles of WMDs have been found in Iraq. In the years and months leading up to the war, the performance of America’s intelligence agencies was inadequate, and Bush and his war planners should have asked harder questions of the intelligence material they reviewed. At the very least, however, David Kay’s analysis demonstrated that Saddam did, in fact, possess a WMD program that could be activated - once the U.N., the French, and the Germans convinced the international community to live and let live. Moreover, the work of Stephen Hayes and Jonathan Schanzer, as well as the recent bombings in Madrid, suggest that the ties between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda are more extensive than Alterman and Green contend. In addition, while wailing away against “the planned neoconservative war against Iraq,” Alterman and Green fail to note that the Clinton supported 1998 Iraq Liberation Act made regime change the policy of the United States. Clinton, of course, did not have the courage of his convictions. Bush does.

These facts alone should be enough to discredit Alterman’s and Green’s analysis of the Iraq War. But they go one step further by giving Saddam the velvet glove treatment. Other than two passing references to Saddam’s brutality, they have nothing to say about his human rights violations, his flouting of U.N. resolutions, his destruction of the Iraqi economy, or his support for Palestinian terrorists who enjoy blowing themselves up at busy Israeli bus stops, restaurants, and markets. They have not one word on the grizzly terror inflicted by Saddam’s goonish sons, his war against the Marsh Arabs, or the hell that was Abu Ghraib. They have not one word on Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds - the Kurdish Hiroshima that was Halabja and Guptapa. And they have not one word on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Alterman and Green do mention that Saddam’s army was in Kuwait and that the U.S. expelled it, but they do not say how or why they were in Kuwait in the first place. Perhaps a vacation?

Alterman’s and Green’s benign treatment of Saddam Hussein seriously erodes their credibility. Other Bush critics, such as Peter Galbraith, have been more astute. In a recent article in the liberal New York Review of Books titled, “How to Get Out of Iraq,” Galbraith rightly faults the Bush administration for not adequately preparing a plan for rebuilding postwar Iraq. At the same time, however, Galbraith begins his essay with a lengthy discussion of the evil nature of Saddam’s regime. It was, Galbraith writes, “one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the twentieth century.” Galbraith also contends that in “a more lawful world, the United Nations, or a coalition of willing states, would have removed this regime from power long before 2003.” I do not agree with most of the things Galbraith has to say about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, but it certainly is refreshing to read his forthright indictment of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. TheBook on Bush offers no such indictment.

Alterman’s and Green’s fourth major charge is that Bush is a reactionary religious nut whose starting point for any policy issue are the following three questions: “What does the religious right want? What does big business want? [And] What do the neocons want?”

This is too simplistic. If Bush is so interested in pleasing conservatives one would think that all conservatives would be falling over backward in defense of him. This has not been the case. For most liberals, Bush is too conservative. For some conservatives, Bush may be too liberal, or too hawkish. In reading The Book on Bush, however, one does not gain any sense of this, or of the diversity of opinions among conservatives generally. Nor does one gain an understanding of the roots, or the consequences, of Bush’s compassionate conservatism. With NCLB and the expansion of the Medicare program, Bush has cherry picked two issues that Democrats have always claimed as their own: education and the welfare of senior citizens. But Bush has gone one step better than the Democrats. Instead of simply dolling out money, he has attached strings to it. Now, schools have to show results for all kids, and important clauses in the Medicare expansion law will introduce private competition for health care dollars.

Alterman and Green fail to understand that Bush is comfortable with government as long as government is efficient. They also fail to appreciate how Bush believes in the power of all individual Americans to take charge of their own lives. With reason, the president believes Americans can spend their money in wiser, more productive ways than the government can. Not surprisingly, his tax cuts have spurred economic growth and reduced unemployment. Home ownership, moreover, is close to record levels.

TheBook on Bush is not one of the left’s better efforts at understanding Bush, contemporary American politics, or the serious threats posed by international terrorism. Far better are the efforts of leftists Michael Walzer, Christopher Hitchens, and Paul Berman. In the spring, 2002 edition of Dissent magazine, Walzer pointedly asked if “there can be a decent left?” Troubled by the left’s response to 9/11 and its opposition to the war in Afghanistan, Walzer argued that “the encounter with Islamic radicalism, and with other versions of politicized religion, should help us understand that high among our interests are our values: secular enlightenment, human rights, and democratic government. Left politics,” he continued, should start “with the defense of these three.” Hitchens quit his post at the Nation magazine because he too was frustrated with the left’s sheepish political antics. And Berman, the author of the useful book Terror and Liberalism, has cogently rooted the Iraq war within the rise of a “mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world” - one “that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had only fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide.” Walzer, Hitchens, and Berman are all examples of leftists who refuse to be tied down to knee-jerk responses to conservative philosophy and assertions of American power. They have also demonstrated a willingness to grapple with the complex realities of a dynamic and dangerous world. Alterman and Green, as is demonstrated by The Book on Bush, are examples of a very different and, unfortunately, more popular left - one that is inflexible, dogmatic, and very dated.