The Difficult Matter of Praising George W Bush

Will Inboden is frustrated that Barack Obama so rarely has anything nice to say about President George W Bush even when his administration has benefitted from US policies Obama inherited from his predecessor or when he has found it convenient to adopt and sometimes even take further Bush-era views on a given subject (such as a wide swathe of civil liberties issues or medical marijuana). In part this frustration reflects a Beltway preference for civility (or, rather, the appearance of civility) and the time-honoured pleasures of bipartisanship. There remain plenty of people who regret the increasingly parliamentary style of Washington politics and many more who have yet to grasp its implications.

This is not a new phenomenon and Bush-era Republicans were in the vanguard of breaking with a good deal of the old-style Washington consensus on how things should be done and the game should be played. (All this, mind you, is another reminder of how, in terms of its political culture, Washington is a different place: you rarely hear David Cameron praise Gordon Brown either and few people find that very strange even if, from time to time, a Prime Minister can make himself seem a bigger man by praising his predecessor.)