Assessing George W. Bush's Legacy The Right Man?

by Morgan, Iwan W.; Davies, Philip John

• ISBN13: 9780230108585
• ISBN10: 023010858X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book examines the legacy of the Bush presidency in term of presidential leadership, politics, and public policy. It focuses on Bush's expansion of presidential power in pursuit of the "war on terror," the ideological and pragmatic foundations of presidential politics, and the complexity of Bush's domestic and foreign policy legacies. In addition to an introductory overview, it contains ten original essays that assess the problems of rating the Bush presidency, the nature of Bush's presidential government, ideology and ideas during Bush's terms, the administration's economic and foreign policies, and the electoral context of the times.

Author Biography

Iwan Morgan is Professor of US Studies and head of US Programs at the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), University of London.  He has written extensively on the US presidency and on budget policy. His books include:  Eisenhower versus ‘the Spenders’; Deficit Government: Taxing and Spending in Modern America; Nixon; and, most recently, The Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. He is the director of the ISA’s United States Presidency Centre and is chair of the executive committee of the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States.

Philip John Davies is Director of the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies. Among his many publications are: Winning Elections and Political Marketing (co-edited with Bruce Newman); The Federal Nation: Perspectives on American Federalism; America’s Americans: Demographic Issues in American Society and Politic; and Right On? Political Change and Continuity in George W. Bush’s America (all co-edited with Iwan Morgan).  He is chair of the American Politics Group, one of the largest specialist groups in the Political Studies Association.

Table of Contents

List of Figure and Tables	p. vii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction: Assessing George W. Bush's Legacy: The Right Man?	p. 1
Rating Bush	p. 11
Bush's Style of Presidential Leadership	p. 31
Bush's Congressional Legacy and Congress's Bush Legacy	p. 51
Bush, the Judiciary, and the Conservative Constitutional Counterrevolution: Close but No Cigar	p. 79
The Ethical Record of the Bush Presidency	p. 99
Did Bush Pursue a Neoconservative Foreign Policy?	p. 121
Bush's Foreign Policy Legacy: Counting the Cost	p. 145
Bush and Big Government Conservatism	p. 165
Bush's Political Economy: Deficits, Debt, and Depression	p. 185
Bush's Partisan Legacy and the 2008 Elections	p. 207
Index	p. 223
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