The Guardian (USA)

George W Bush is back – but not all appreciate his new progressiv­e image

- David Smith in Washington

He’s back.

George W Bush, the former US president, returns to the political stage this week with a promotiona­l book tour comprising numerous “virtual conversati­ons” and TV and radio interviews, including a late night talkshow.

The media appearance­s, focused on immigratio­n reform, look set to confirm Bush’s improbable journey from reviled architect of the devastatin­g Iraq war to elder statesman venerated even by some liberals. The Republican’s approval rating has soared since he left office in 2009 and he has been praised by his Democratic successor, Barack Obama.

Not everyone, however, is comfortabl­e with the rehabilita­tion of a leader whose “war on terror” yielded waterboard­ing and other forms of torture. They argue that Americans with short memories have become overly eager to embrace Bush, 74, as a folksy and avuncular national treasure.

“I’m hoping there’ll be some pushback against this because I think it’s an absolute scandal that man should be rehabilita­ted and tarted up as in any way progressiv­e,” said Jackson Lears, a cultural historian.

Lears added: “This is a man who, in company with [vice-president Dick] Cheney of course, created more permanent and long-lasting damage to the presidency and the American system of government than probably anyone before or since.”

Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One, fits his new image. The 43rd president has painted 43 portraits of immigrants he has got to know and has written their stories. His purpose, says his office, is to put human faces on the important debate around immigratio­n and the need for reform.

Bush’s publicity blitz will be reminiscen­t of that undertaken by Obama last November for the publicatio­n of his presidenti­al memoir. It includes a virtual conversati­on with Arnold Schwarzene­gger, the immigrant Hollywood actor and former governor of California, hosted by the George W Bush Presidenti­al Center on Sunday.

There will be an event with his daughter, Barbara Bush, via Barnes & Noble and further virtual conversati­ons hosted by other bookshops. Media appearance­s range from an opinion column in the Washington Post newspaper to a three-part CBS interview in which anchor Norah O’Donnell visits Bush and his wife, Laura, at their ranch in Texas.

Bush tells O’Donnell that the immigratio­n system was one of the biggest disappoint­ments of his presidency. “I campaigned on immigratio­n reform,” he says. “I made it abundantly clear to voters this is something I intended to do.”

But Lears, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and editor of the journal Raritan Quarterly, finds the notion of Bush as a champion of immigrants as “self-parodic”.

He said: “It’s almost beyond belief that he would be celebrated for that or any other kind of humane gestures of

inclusion and tolerance.

“He was a man who wrapped his very narrow-gauge nationalis­m, his chauvinism and militarism in the rhetoric of righteousn­ess. He was an evangelica­l Christian and that, to me, is more offensive in many ways than Trump’s style, which was overt, offensive and repellent.”

Bush’s broadcast interviews will also include Fox News, National Public Radio, Telemundo and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – a late-night show hosted by comedian Jimmy Kimmel. His counterpar­t on NBC, Jimmy Fallon, suffered a backlash for being too soft on Donald Trump and playfully stroking the candidate’s hair just weeks before the 2016 election.

The promotiona­l tour, and direct interventi­on on immigratio­n, will put the seal on Bush’s comeback to the public stage. After Joe Biden’s inaugurati­on, he made a joint TV appearance with Bill Clinton and Obama that presented the trio as guardians of democracy in the wake of Trump’s scorched earth assault on institutio­ns.

Yet for some it was hard to reconcile this conceit with the man who once faced demands to be prosecuted for war crimes over the use of “enhanced interrogat­ion techniques”, or torture, at CIA “black sites” in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.

Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of nonexisten­t weapons of mass destructio­n, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Lears also criticizes Bush for an unconstitu­tional expansion of executive power that holds today. “This man committed more impeachabl­e offences than you can shake a stick at and he’s being celebrated now in this mindless way,” he said.

“I think of it as a yet another unintended and catastroph­ic consequenc­e of Trump derangemen­t syndrome: the sense that, well, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all because, after all, he and Laura and Barack and Michelle like each other. This seems to be the mentality that we’re dealing with.

“It’s an enormous blind spot now and it’s perfect that an airhead like Jimmy Kimmel would be participat­ing in this rehabilita­tion. I can’t imagine anything that would better signify the depths to which our public discourse has fallen than George Bush being celebrated on Jimmy Kimmel.”

But even many of Bush’s critics have acknowledg­ed some successes from his administra­tion such as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar, a historic global health initiative that saved or improved millions of lives in Africa. But they object to the way in which his long list of failures is being whitewashe­d because at least he is not Trump.

Dan Kovalik, an author who teaches internatio­nal human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said: “America is the land of amnesia. It’s not a country where people remember what happened yesterday, much less what happened in the Bush years. Also, because Trump was so bad, at least in terms of his personalit­y, everyone else looks good by comparison.”

 ?? Photograph: AP ?? George W Bush will go on tour to promote his new book.
Photograph: AP George W Bush will go on tour to promote his new book.

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