He promised before coming into office to be a “uniter,” but no one, except perhaps for his successor, was a better divider than was Bush the Second. And moderates hold against him the deep recession and the divisive political environment. Liberals are still bitter over the lost 2000 election and the two Bush initiated wars. Conservatives now remember him as a big spending, big deficit president who tried to buy acceptance with public dollars from those who thought him a heartless rich kid. It is also not that Bush has many friends left from that time. There are some big gaps in its degree of frankness as I will discuss later. It is not that the book is very revealing or insightful about his time as president. The favorable reception needs some explaining. Instead, there was just a pouty combativeness when things did not turn out well as too frequently was the case.ĭecision Points is George W.

He was in the end as he said “The Decider,” but in being that he never conveyed the notion that deciding involved much deep thinking or carried with it any lingering doubts.

He often displayed a deer caught in the headlights quality in his big public moments that did not help generate confidence in his leadership. Throughout it all there was the ersatz cowboy backslapping informality, the mangled sentences, and the misplaced loyalty to hopelessly bad appointees that grated. First there were the contested Florida election results that required Supreme Court intervention to resolve, then the horrible terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC that took so many innocent lives, then the two retaliatory wars where quick battlefield successes turned into brutally costly, dragged out contests with bands of criminal, ethnic, and religious fanatics, then the awful storm destruction along the Gulf Coast and the flooding of New Orleans that placed governmental ineptitude on global display, and finally, an financial bubble that when it burst destroyed millions of jobs and many more dreams.

George bush decision points