Taking the Measure of Bush II

...The Cold War's end revived the dormantunilateralist impulse...

...In 1976, a shift of 8,000 votes in two states would have put Gerald Ford in the White House, although Jimmy Carter led by more than 1.5 million votes...

...Schlesinger rejects the usual answer, directly electing the President, because of the harm it would do to the party system—already battered by the effects of television and public opinion polls that free candidates from dependence on their parties...

...Schlesinger does not underestimate Bush: "For all his buffoonish side, the President is secure in himself, disciplined, decisive, crafty, and capable of concentrating on a few priorities...

...The lesson from history Bush II learned is that his father should have overthrown Saddam...

...Schlesinger is right when he notes that history, "by putting crisis in perspective, supplies the antidote to every generation's illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive...

...His book closes as follows: ". . while the tragedy of history implicates us all in the common plight of humanity, we are never relieved, despite the limits of our knowledge and the darkness of our understanding, from the necessity of meeting our obligations...

...Because of this give-andtake the leader in the first round might not be the same person who gets 40 per cent in the runoff, further reducing confidence in his or her legitimacy...

...Writing to a friend, the young Churchill said he would like to make people better fed and happier...

...Unilateralism reached its peak thus far with the invasion of Iraq...

...But since Bush I had no intention of invading Iraq, he created expectations he could not fulfill...

...Many benefits would result from this simple change, the first being no more minority vote Presidents like Bush...

...Then there is President Bush, who a senior aide says, "really believes he was placed here to do this [seize Iraq] as part of a divine plan...

...It was the actual policy of the United States, except briefly during World War I, until Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor converted a majority of Americans to internationalism...

...But for many voters abortion matters more than income inequality, and it is this bloc—Schlesinger thinks it might amount to 40 per cent of the electorate—that makes Bush formidable despite his colossal blunders...

...In 1948, ashiftof fewer than30,000 votes in three states would have made Thomas E. Dewey President despite his having trailed Harry S. Truman by over 2 million ballots...

...He begins at the beginning, with the doctrine of unilateralism established by George Washington when he urged his countrymen to avoid "entangling alliances...

...So much for the proposition that truth emerges when all points of view are freely debated...

...In 1916, if Charles Evans Hughes had gotten 4,000 additional votes in California he would have won the most Electoral College votes even though Wilson outpolled him...

...The Ralph Naders, Ross Perots and Pat Buchanans would still run independently, as would the leaders of numerous single-issue groups...

...It would create a pool of 102 additional electoral votes, two for each state and the District of Columbia, which would be awarded to the popular vote winner...

...At the same time, as a man whose hero is Franklin D. Roosevelt, Schlesinger cannot leave it at that...

...Although clear about these matters, Schlesinger exercises impressive restraint, given that thinking about President Bush tends to make liberals crazy...

...He has also done a good job of keeping together his ramshackle domestic coalition...

...We now know the Bush Administration planned from the outset to topple Saddam Hussein...

...But Schlesinger does want reforms that would prevent a candidate who loses the popular vote from winning in the Electoral College again...

...In 1978 the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Reform of the Presidential Election Process put forward a national bonus plan...

...But it needs to be said over and over again, and history does have its uses...

...Accordingly, direct election bills usually mandate a runoffif no candidate wins 40 per cent of the vote...

...Schlesinger reviews Bush's numerous actual and desired assaults on civil liberties, notably the infamous Patriot Act...

...Unlike those earlier books, War and the American Presidencypreaches to the choir...

...That important book redefined liberalism in the early days of the Cold War, a time when many liberals were having trouble finding their bearings after years of seeing the Soviet Union as a shining example and then as our great ally in World War II...

...Most of Schlesinger's books combine history with biography, but as a man fiercely engaged with the present he has also written on contemporary issues of great moment, beginning with The Vital Center (1949...

...As it turns out, there is a simple solution...

...Instead of polemicizing, he provides valuable historical information and analyses that he hopes will raise the discussion to a higher level...

...Most experts believe that if voters cast their ballots directly for the President instead of an elector, the rickety party system would collapse entirely...

...For policymakers history is a list of mistakes not to be repeated, beginning with the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938...

...These are words he has always lived by...

...This proposal failed when first put forward, but after the stolen election of 2000 it may stand a better chance today...

...Since the incomes of most Americans have been stagnant or declining for over 30 years, it might be supposed that a President whose economic plan entails massive tax cuts for the rich would generate little support...

...For years Congress withheld large sums of money owed to the UN...

...The National Security Council devoted its very first meeting 10 days after he took office to this subject...

...This has only happened four times, but there have been a number of close calls...

...A colleague at Rutgers once assigned this book to a class of graduate students, who rose up in rebellion because they knew without reading it that The Disuniting of America was evil, and probably racist...

...Yet untold harm has been done by this analogy, which is always employed to rule out diplomacy...

...In the light of the overweening arrogance, ignorance and recklessness of the Bush Administration this almost goes without saying...

...Bush I shot himself in the foot by comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler and saying that negotiations with him would lead to another Munich...

...Schlesinger divides the Administration's unilateralists into two groups...

...Shades ofWoodrow Wilson, who also believed he was God's agent on earth when he took the U. S. to war in 1917 with appalling results...

...Bills have been introduced calling for American withdrawal from the organization...

...No attempt is made to persuade the reader that President George W. Bush is incompetent or worse, and that the occupation of Iraq has become a costly debacle...

...Bush II promptly did so, bringing about the very disasters that Bush I had warned against...

...This slim, gracefully written new volume demonstrates that he is still going strong...

...It would employ the existing state political mechanisms, discourage splinter parties, and lead the major parties to campaign in states they expect to lose, since every ballot would count toward winning the bonus electoral votes...

...In launching it Bush abandoned containment and deterrence through multilateral agencies like the UN and NATO, policies that won the Cold War, and asserted the right to invade whatever country he pleases...

...All elections would lead to runoffs, and the splinter parties would trade their support for concessions from the front-runners...

...The irony of this is evidently lost on Bush ?. Schlesinger agrees with Winston Churchill that government should be practical and modest in its ambitions...

...War, traditionally a matter of last resort, becomes a matter of Presidential choice," observes Schlesinger, who calls this change "revolutionary...

...Mostly they "want to use American power to intimidate rival nations and to crush potential threats to American security...

...In 1995 Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich launched an attack on the United Nations that continues to this day...

...Schlesinger thinks this would not be good enough...

...Decades later Schlesinger published The Disuniting of America (1991), his bold and timely critique of multiculturalism...

...This implied that Saddam would have to surrender unconditionally...

...If incidentally I benefit posterity—so much the better—but I would not sacrifice my own generation to a principle however high or a truth however great...

...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the dean of American historians and an active Democrat, published his first book in 1939...

...He refrains, though, from offering a solution to the mess in Iraq...

...He also provides a useful survey on dissent in wartime, giving readers plenty of examples that show criticism of Bush's foreign and defense policies is not unpatriotic...

...The scary neocons—Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, National Security Council Near East specialist Elliott Abrams, and their allies outside of government—"want to remake the world in America's image:' Assertive nationalists— chiefly Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld—are more opportunistic although equally heavy-handed...

...It is an odd feature of contemporary political life that a large part of the electorate— particularly the Religious Right, including conservative Jews and Catholics— votes according to its moral beliefs rather than out of economic self-interest...

...Schlesinger's final chapter, "The Inscrutability of History," speculates on the usefulness of history and stresses the need for deeper reflection and greater prudence on the part of national leaders...