Despite radically different personalities, biographies and political philosophies, it is already clear that the continuities from Bush to Obama matter as much as the reversals, especially on national security. Obama applied the Bush surge strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan. Both men said they wanted to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay but proved unable to do so.
More broadly, both men are governing in a post-Sept. 11 environment, in chronically sluggish economies, amassing large budget deficits. Both came to the presidency promising to be unifiers and each won reelection with narrow majorities cobbled together from deliberately polarizing campaigns.
So far, despite a wealth of memoirs and other books exploring different aspects of his tenure, there is not yet an authoritative, ideologically neutral history of his eight years. One book promising to fill that void is coming in October, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House,” by New York Times writer Peter Baker.
Baker says that by the time Obama took over, many of the most controversial Bush policies, about interrogation of detainees, or rules for electronic surveillance, had been sanded by court rulings or executive branch decisions. Much of what remained, such as the aggressive use of drones to assassinate terror suspects, Obama was of little mind to change, no matter his previous denunciations.
“Obama has kept a lot of what Bush left him … and that is helpful to Bush [in arguing] that his policies were not an aberration,” Baker said.
As the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “Historians should not overlook the capacity of presidents to do more for the reputations of their predecessors than for their own.”
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