Newswise — Intelligent, yet prone to making decisions without much thought. Moral and godly, yet with a tendency to vilify anyone who disagrees with him. A bold visionary unable to adjust to changing conditions.
These are a few of the characterizations offered in a new book about George W. Bush that evaluates the man and his presidency. The 43rd president may have left the Oval Office less than one year ago, but his eight years as president of the United States have given political scientists plenty of material to use in evaluating his presidency.
Robert Maranto, a University of Arkansas professor, is lead editor of the volume, Judging Bush, published by Stanford University Press. Maranto will give a reading on Friday, Oct. 23, and C-SPAN's Book TV plans to cover the event to be broadcast on C-SPAN 2 in the coming weeks.
Maranto joined the faculty of the College of Education and Health Professions in 2008 as the Twenty-First Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform. He formerly worked as a professor of political science at Villanova University.
The other editors are Tom Lansford, academic dean of the Gulf Coast campus at the University of Southern Mississippi, and Jeremy Johnson, a doctoral candidate in political science at Brown University. A number of contributors to the book have worked in government, including Maranto, who served the Clinton administration from 1996 to 1999.
The editors acknowledge that some may think it a tad early to be judging Bush.
"As Bush himself points out, historians still debate the presidency of the first GW, George Washington; so it requires some chutzpah for us to spring out of the box with evaluations of the forty-third presidency," Maranto wrote in the preface. "To this we have three responses.
"First, by employing the criteria set out in Neil Reedy and Jeremy Johnson's introductory chapter, we feel that this work is clearer and more systematic than most such analyses," he continued. "Second, the quality of our contributing authors demands respect. Finally, we have purposely commissioned a diverse set of authors and encouraged them to interact with each other, to guard against the groupthink that so commonly occurs in both the White House and the ivory tower."
Judging Bush is divided into sections that examine Bush's decision making, the role of vice president, domestic policymaking and the Bush foreign policy. A final section includes chapters by former Clinton domestic policy adviser William Galston and former Bush White House official John DiIulio, who provide detailed evaluations of the Bush years in office from their perspective as insiders.
The chapter that Maranto wrote with Richard Redding, titled "Bush's Brain (No, Not Karl Rove): How Bush's Psyche Shaped His Decision Making," includes sections on the former president's IQ, his style of thinking, his personality, and how they led to different decision-making processes on domestic policies such as education reform and foreign policies such as the invasion of Iraq. Four additional chapters of the book address the administration's inadequate planning for the Iraq War.
Additional information about the book and the contributors is available at the press' Web site: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17100. It was created from presentations given at a conference of the same name in November 2008 at Villanova University.
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