Ah, a reasonable discussion on Slashdot, what am I to do.
And the problem with achievement is that achievement isn't necessarily productive or wholly worthwhile. Look at Mao, for example. On the one hand, he did radically propel China forward into being a strongly developing country. On the other hand, his clear lack of experience and overconfidence in the ability to micromanage such a large country resulted in massive famine and strife.
In comparison to Mao, I think Bush was not all that different than Clinton and his father before him...largely a maintainer of the status quo. He certainly was not the transformative character that Mao was and Obama apparently is trying to be.
No, what did that for him was a collection of individuals who have done the same thing for countless other individuals (including Bush's father). Bush was a face and a personality and while he certainly shaped the campaigns that gained him Governorship and Presidentship--and he certainly exercised significant power when elected--, he was far from "the decider" or in a position where most people weren't sheltered even if he made grossly large mistakes in procedure. I'm not saying he didn't accomplish something extraordinary, but I'd almost argue that getting a PhD is a greater achievement because it's less based upon a popularity contest and more on actual ability. Certainly, that's not the basis for Bush being elected.
All Presidents are figureheads to a large degree, by virtue of the demands of the office. Where they influence things is in the people that they appoint to run the country. Sure, GWB filled his cabinet and the rest of the administration with retreads from prior administrations, but these were people largely with a decent amount of policy experience within the mainstream of society. For all of the rancor that was thrown there way, people like Ashcroft really were not that bad. When push came to shove, Ashcroft defended the Constitution.
I'm curious of what you speak in this regard. I would definitely say that Obama has certainly been in the news more and did more in the first year than Bush did (well, prior to 9/11). Beyond that, I'm not sure where you've actually pragmatically seen what any of Bush or Obama has done to you. And ideologically, Bush authorized or was otherwise reasonably culpable for authorizing a number of horrible things (warrantless wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and indefinite imprisonment); Obama isn't much better, continuing about half the mentioned practices. In any case, I'd love to hear an elaboration.
The economy would be a good start. Obama took a structural $450 billion a year deficit under Bush (which was hardly anything to be proud about) and has turned it into a structural $1.4 trillion annual deficit. This is simply unrecoverable without severe austerity. It ends in ruination. At the end of Obama's term, we will have doubled the national debt at the same time that Social Security and Medicare goes into the red. In my opinion, this is what you get when you nominate a bunch of socialist and marxist retreads to your cabinet. They really have no clue on how to run an economy. Turbo Tax Timmy couldn't even balance his own taxes correctly, but now he's running the Treasury Department trying to fix the entire economy (Turbo Tax Timmy is a good example of where academic achievement doesn't necessarily confer real world success and achievement). Obama's mismanagement of the economy is almost enough for me to really believe he's an adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of collapsing the system to bring on socialism at the national level.
