Forget Legacy-Building: Iraq is NO Japan Mr President (TWN)

[kpete]

Forget Legacy-Building: Iraq is NO Japan Mr President

David Sanger has a stinging article in the New York Times today basically ridiculing President Bush's notions of Iraq-related legacy building. He suggests that the President's recent actions on everything from Supreme Court appointments to rhetoric about democratizing Iraq are designed to get historians to see his presidency as an FDR-type reign rather than that of a Franklin Pierce.

Sanger's piece indicates that either David has finally just had it with the White House and is ready to forfeit his White House spot to someone else -- or he, like so many others, senses real weakness in the Bush White House team and sees this as the time to begin emphasizing that the wannabe emperor really has no clothes on.

Sanger's critique is hard-hitting and would have been practically impossible for him to write three years ago without serious retribution from Karl Rove and company. One would hope that writers of David Sanger's stature would always write boldly and candidly -- and Sanger generally has, particularly on White House foreign policy and nuclear negotiations missteps -- but writing about the White House and the President is also walking a tight-rope between the public's right to know and the President's willingness and obligation to be transparent.

But bravo for today's piece. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/weekinreview/01sanger.html

http://thewashingtonnote.com/

[MissMarple]

1. Here's a little something on Franklin Pierce.

The last sentence in the second paragraph does not paint such a congenial picture as the first part of it might indicate.


"His good looks and inoffensive personality caused him to make many friends, but he did not do what was necessary to avoid the impending American Civil War, thus giving him his reputation as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. Pierce's popularity in the North went down sharply after he came out in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise and reopening the question of the expansion of slavery in the West. Pierce's credibility was further damaged when several of his foreign ministers issued the Ostend Manifesto. Abandoned by his own party, he was not renominated at the 1856 presidential election, and was replaced by James Buchanan. After losing the Democratic nomination, Pierce continued his lifelong struggle with alcoholism as his marriage to Jane Means Appleton Pierce fell apart. He destroyed his reputation by declaring support for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He died in 1869 from cirrhosis.

Kunhardt wrote in The American President what many historians believe about Pierce: that he was "a good man who didn't understand his own shortcomings. To his credit, he loved his wife and reshaped himself so that he could put up with her aristocratic, nervous ways and show her true affection. He was one of the most popular men in New Hampshire, polite and thoughtful, easy and good at the political game, charming and fine and handsome. And he was genuinely religious. And yet he was a timid man with a shallow, rigid, old-fashioned mind which could not cope with a changing America. In addition, Pierce was hounded by guilt, temptation, and just plain bad luck."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Pierce