DALLAS — Do we dare to hope that the Bush administration is finally at an end?
After four years of bending the Constitution, the constitutional law professor now in the White House is trying to unloose the Gordian knot of W.'s martial and moral overreaches after 9/11. Safely re-elected, President Barack Obama at last spoke about the Faustian deals struck by his predecessor, some of them cravenly continued by his own administration.
In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama said we "compromised our basic values," and he ended with a slap at W.: "Our victory against terrorism won't be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship or a statue being pulled to the ground."
On the eve of the president's speech, I was at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum here, watching the film of Saddam's statue being pulled to the ground.
It's remarkable that Obama is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency just as W. is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency. Browsing the library, you wonder if these two presidents are complete opposites after all, as you see how history was shaped by an arrogant, press-averse, father-fixated, history-obsessed, strangely introverted chief executive.
Robert Draper, the author of "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush," perused the library with me and observed: "So 43 grew up entitled but could display a commoner's touch, while 44 grew up hardscrabble yet developed this imperial mien. The former is defined by incuriosity, the latter by self-absorption. One is a late-blooming artist, the other a precocious writer. They can each make you kind of miss the other."
Obama's compelling speech was his way of saying he didn't want the seductive but morally dicey drone program he inherited from W. to define his own presidency.
W.'s library highlights his role in launching the Global War on Terror, an Orwellian phrase designed to conflate the sins of Osama, who was responsible for 9/11, and the sins of Saddam, who was not. That was the fatal mistake and hallmark of the Bush era. W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smoke screen and treated pre-emptive attacks as just.
Obama brought his lapidary logic and legal cautions to bear. "Neither I nor any president can promise the total defeat of terror," he said. "We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings nor stamp out every danger to our open society."
Conservatives can honk, as Sen. Saxby Chambliss did, that Obama's speech "will be viewed by terrorists as a victory." But this president has killed more top al-Qaida operatives than Bush did.While W.'s bullhorn vow after 9/11 to catch the "people who knocked these buildings down" plays at his library, I couldn't find any photos of Osama or acknowledgment of Bush's failure to catch him. Obama's library will have a wing for that feat.
You could fill an entire other library with what's not in W.'s. Cheney and Rummy have been largely disappeared, and Condi Rice narrates the 9/11 video. You won't see the "Mission Accomplished" photo, or that painful video in which W. keeps reading "The Pet Goat" to children after learning America is under attack, or the "flyover" photo of a desultory Bush jetting to the White House and looking through the window of Air Force One at Katrina's devastation.
Decision Points Theater — a whiny "Well, you try being the Decider" enterprise — lets you make the decisions after getting taped briefings on W.'s crises from actors playing experts. But it is rigged with so many false binary options that the visitors I voted with ended up agreeing with Bush's patently wrong calls on Iraq and Katrina.
Mostly, aside from the word "freedom" reverberating endlessly, we see the kinder, gentler W. conjured by Laura the Librarian.
You can be forgiven for thinking you've wandered into the Gore presidential library when you come upon a wall devoted to protection of the ocean and odes to "vital wetlands" and "marine habitats."
Proving that the library is more a monument to Laura's artful airbrushing than W.'s artless leadership, there's a swank Cafe 43 with fancier fare than W.'s cherished PB&J's, and a gift shop featuring Laura's favorite books, from Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" to Truman Capote's "Music for Chameleons."
W. missed a bet not selling reproductions of his charming nude self-portraits and Barney paintings on posters, T-shirts and dog bowls. Far more interesting than packets of Texas bluebonnet seeds.