Domestic Policies of George W.

Bush
When George W. Bush took the oath of office, he became the third President out of the past four who had cut his teeth in public life as a governor. True to this pedigree, the issues Bush initially focused on were domestic in nature. They ranged from cutting taxes and seeking to expand energy production to bolstering public education. In fact, he was in Florida on September 11, 2001, trying to draw attention to his education initiatives when the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Of course, the events of that day -- and Bush's response to them -- shaped every aspect of his presidency from that moment forward. But Bush pursued his domestic agenda with considerable success both before and after 9/11.

The Tax Cutter

During the 2000 election campaign, the Bush camp allowed visitors to the campaign's Internet web site to plug in their income and deductions to figure out how much they would get back from a Bush tax cut. In September 1999, President Clinton vetoed a $792 billion tax cut over 10 years that the Republican Congress sent to him as a pre-election year ploy. Al Gore, the Democrats' nominee-in-waiting, previewed his 2000 campaign language by denouncing the GOP gambit as a "risky scheme." Clinton himself actually taunted the Republican presidential candidates -- Bush included -- by quipping that they could now run on a tax cut. Bush was already doing just that, and he seized the initiative on this issue by proposing a tax cut even larger than the one Clinton had vetoed. In the first week of Bush's presidency, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan testified that Bush's proposed tax cuts -- he was now asking for a $1.6 trillion cut over 10 years - would not harm the already slowing economy, and might do some good. Democratic congressional leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt promptly announced that they'd accept a 10-year figure of up to $900 billion. Moderate Democratic senator John Breaux of Louisiana, set a ceiling of $1.25 trillion -- the number that passed the Senate on Bush's 77th day in office. By then, the President had finally signaled that, he too, would compromise, and after differences were ironed out between the House and Senate versions of the legislation, Bush had wrangled out of Congress a tax cut estimated at $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion over 10 years. The measure, signed by Bush in the East Room on June 7, 2001, exempted millions of Americans from paying any taxes, created a new 10 percent bracket for the working poor, while lowering the top three brackets as well: by 2006, the top tax rate was to decline from 39.6 percent to 35 percent; the 36 percent rate to 33 percent, and the 28 percent rate to 25 percent. "A year ago, tax relief was said to be a political impossibility. Six months ago, it was supposed to be a political liability. Today, it becomes reality," Bush said at

the bill signing ceremony. "This tax relief plan is principled. We cut taxes for every income taxpayer. We target nobody in, we target nobody out. And tax relief is now on the way." Indeed, as he spoke, $300 and $600 rebate checks were being prepared for mailing to American taxpayers. This idea originated, ironically, with Representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only Socialist in Congress.

Negative Consequences of the Tax Cut

One was that if the economy were to slow down further, the effects on the federal deficit could be explosive. The second was that the most politically popular portions of the bill -- ending the so-called marriage penalty, phasing out inheritance taxes, and doubling the child credit -- were not phased in for years under the legislation -- and that there would be political pressure to expedite them, adding even more to the deficit. "I think this is kind of a tax-cut time bomb," Bruce Bartlett, an economist for the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted when the bill passed. "No matter what happens in the 2004 elections, there probably has to be another tax cut in 2005." Bartlett proved prophetic -- although Bush did not even wait that long to propose -- and sign -- legislation escalating the speed with which the cuts were to take effect. For his part, the President insisted that his tax cuts had shortened the recession he inherited in both duration and depth. Many economists agreed, but they also noted that the deficits the Bush administration were running in 2004 were the largest in history -- with no end in sight.

No Child Left Behind Act

In time, this piece of legislation would be disparaged so successfully by the National Education Association, which was always skeptical of it, that most of the Democrats running for President in 2004 would routinely allude to it negatively in their standard stump speech. But its history serves mainly as a cautionary tale about the difficulty of effecting change in Washington. When No Child Left Behind passed, it had as much bipartisan support as any major legislation in many years. Moreover, both the machinery and objective of this program were borrowed from President Clinton, who aggressively promoted his version of school accountability ("Goals 2000") for eight years, and who devoted much of his 1999 State of the Union Address to explaining why it was important to keep the momentum on education reform moving forward. In his inauguration address, Bush said that in accepting low scholastic achievement by minority students as the norm, the United States was engaging in the "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Bush's version of a plan to address this condition passed the House on a vote of 381-41; the Senate approved it 8710. The President signed the bill on January 8, 2002, while sitting at a school desk in Hamilton, Ohio. The legislation mandates student testing and ties federal funding to the results; low performing schools won't have their funding withdrawn, but must take

concrete steps to improve. From the start, however, Democrats expressed concerns that not enough money was being appropriated for what Bush was trying to accomplish. In early March of 2002, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who'd shepherded the bill through the Senate and appeared in public with Bush to promote it, broke with the White House over funding. Kennedy called the administration's budget requests for education "a severe blow to our nation's schools" -- and less than the administration had promised. "It's time for the administration to match its rhetoric with real resources," Kennedy added. In time, this refrain became a rallying cry for the Democrats and for the teachers' unions, and was echoed by big-city school districts whose finances had suffered from a downturn in their local economies. By the 2004 campaign, John Kerry was offering the No Child Left Behind Act as an example not of bold reform but of a broken promise from a President who "is misleading the American people." Bush, in his final debate with Kerry, countered that he had increased Department of Education spending some 49 percent. In fact, the President was understating the case. The true figure was closer to 60 percent. This pattern of "point-counterpoint" became a feature of Washington politics. Bush would work an issue, get bi-partisan support, then watch as Democrats -even those who'd voted for the legislation -- refused to give him any credit, and indeed, criticized the legislation bitterly. It happened on No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act, and a broad-based reform of Medicare that included the first-ever drug benefit for seniors. In the Bush White House, the Democrats' change of heart on these issues was evidence that the Democratic Party is too easily whipsawed by powerful liberal special interest groups. Democrats viewed it differently. To them, Bush's conciliatory rhetoric and bipartisan legislation were undermined by an unwillingness on his party to fund his own programs sufficiently, and by an incompetent execution of his own policies. And they didn't limit this criticism of the President to domestic policy.

September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks (often referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/11, in combination with the attacks' side effects on that day) were a series of four coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners.[2][3] The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and thousands of those working in the buildings. Both towers collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. A third airliner was crashed into the Pentagon. Hijackers had redirected the fourth plane toward Washington, D.C., targeting either the Capitol Building or the White House, but crashed it in a field

near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake control of the airliner. There were no survivors from any of the flights. Nearly 3,000 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the attacks. Among the 2,753 victims who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center were 343 firefighters and 60 police officers from New York City and the Port Authority, and 8 private emergency medical technicians and paramedics.[5] Another 184 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon. The overwhelming majority of casualties were civilians, including nationals of over 70 countries. Suspicion quickly fell on al-Qaeda. Its leader Osama bin Laden initially denied involvement, but in 2004 he finally claimed responsibility for the attacks.[1] Al-Qaeda and bin Laden cited U.S. support of Israel, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iraq as motives for the attacks. The United States responded to the attacks by launching the War on Terror, invading Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda members, and by enacting the USA PATRIOT Act. It was not until May 2011 that bin Laden was found and killed. Many other countries also strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation and expanded law enforcement powers. Some American stock exchanges stayed closed for the rest of the week following the attack and posted enormous losses on reopening, especially in the airline and insurance industries. The destruction of billions of dollars' worth of office space caused serious damage to the economy of Lower Manhattan. The damage to the Pentagon was cleared and repaired within a year, and the Pentagon Memorial was built adjacent to the building. The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site began in 2002 and remains ongoing. Ground was broken for the Flight 93 National Memorial on November 8, 2009, and the first phase of construction is expected to be ready for the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2011.

Foreign Affairs
In the second presidential debate of the 2000 campaign, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Al Gore to explain the justification for American military interventions in a host of places, including Kosovo to Haiti. Lehrer then turned to Bush and asked him specifically about Somalia. "Started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong," Bush replied. "The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it's in our best interests. But in this case it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn't have supported either." As President, Bush developed a more benign view of the value of nation-building -- a reaction, he explained, to the attacks of 9/11 -- but looking back there is something buried in Bush's comment in that debate which proved more telling: his matter-of-fact statement about using American military force to "overthrow the dictator."

Afghanistan
The Twin Towers had not yet collapsed before CIA director George Tenet was telling subordinates that the attacks had Osama bin Laden's fingerprints all over them. The Al Qaeda leader was then holed up in Afghanistan where the Taliban had given him sanctuary. The United States immediately demanded the Taliban turn him over, but Bush and his foreign policy advisers knew this was unlikely to happen; the night of the attacks, Tenet told the President that in his opinion, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were one and the same. Nine days later, on September 20, 2001, Bush went to Capitol Hill to deliver a speech that members of Congress understood to be a declaration of war. Bush explicitly demanded that the Taliban surrender to the United States not only bin Laden but all al Qaeda leaders currently operating within Afghanistan. He also called on it to free all foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers "unjustly imprisoned" there, close every terrorist training camp, and arrest "every terrorist and every person in (the terrorists') support structure." "They will hand over the terrorists, Bush said, "or they will share in their fate." Emphasizing a theme he would return to many times, Bush took pains to say that Islam was not the enemy; rather, the United States was fighting a "fringe form of Islamic extremism . . . [advocated by those following] in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism." "The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends," Bush added. "Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them." British prime minister Tony Blair attended the speech as a show of solidarity with the United States, and subsequently issued his own ultimatum to the Taliban: "Surrender bin Laden or surrender power," Blair warned. The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. "On my order, U.S. forces have begun strikes on terrorist camps of al Qaeda, and the military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan," Bush said in a somber, televised address from the White House Treaty Room. The air assaults, he said, were joined by Great Britain, with assorted intelligence efforts and logistical support coming from several other nations, including France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. Apparently anticipating U.S. retaliation for 9/11, Al Qaeda had, a few days before the attacks, assassinated Ahmed Shad Massoud, the leader of an anti-Taliban rebel force known as the Northern Alliance. It was widely believed that without Massoud, the Northern Alliance would fracture as a fighting force. Instead, bolstered by U.S. warplanes and U.S. Special Forces, the Northern Alliance helped oust the Taliban, first by taking Mazar Al-Sharif on the northern frontier and then the capital city of Kabul. A fledgling democracy was installed in Afghanistan, but even before that country was truly pacified, the Bush administration had turned its attention to an old adversary, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.

"Axis of Evil"

Iraq had not been implicated in the attacks of 9/11. But Bush said that his decision to invade the country and seek to replace its Baathist regime with a democracy was based on several considerations that grew out of that attack. Convinced by intelligence reports, which later proved erroneous, that Saddam had amassed huge caches of biological and chemical weapons -- and was trying to develop nuclear devices -- a group of hawks in the Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, argued that Iraq would be a likely source for terrorists to obtain such weapons. These officials argued for a final decisive move against Saddam. The United States had fought a war against Iraq ten years earlier when Bush's father was President -- Cheney had been the senior Bush's secretary of defense -- but Saddam was allowed to remain in power after his troops were ejected from Kuwait, subject to various considerations. Among these terms were that Iraqi warplanes were not allowed to fly in Shiite areas of the southern part of the country or Kurdish areas in the north, and that Saddam destroy his caches of biological and chemical weapons, and dismantle his nuclear weapons research program. In his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address, Bush made it clear that he would not allow Saddam to acquire such weapons, and included Iraq in a list of nations -- the other two were Iran and North Korea -- that he termed "an axis of evil." From that day until March 19, 2003, when the invasion began, Bush spoke publicly about Iraq 164 times. Each time, he cited multiple reasons to replace Saddam's regime: that Saddam was acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and that his gassing of Kurdish towns and Iranian troops in the 1980s had proven his willingness to use them; that Iraq had been defying United Nations resolutions since the end of the Persian Gulf War; that the regime was a destabilizing influence in the region, having invaded Kuwait and Iran, and launched Scud missiles against Saudi Arabia and Israel; that Saddam supported terrorism, even to the point of paying off Palestinian suicide bombers who killed Israeli citizens; that a democracy in Iraq would set a badly needed example for the Arab world; that such a government, in turn, would make it easier to forge a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine; and that Saddam and his sons and his secret police had inflicted unimaginable horrors on the Iraqi people, who have every much as right to be free as Americans. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world," Bush said many times. "It is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world."

The Road to Baghdad

Bush's decision to invade Iraq became by far the most controversial of his administration, and costly in numerous ways. In October 2002, he presented Congress with a resolution authorizing him to invade Iraq if Saddam Hussein did not surrender what everyone on both sides of the debate assumed to be a reality: its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. On October 11, the measure passed both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support. In the House, the tally was 296-133. The percentage in the Senate was even greater, where it passed on a vote of 77-23. All Republican senators save one gave it their support; 29 Democrats voted for it, with only 22 in opposition. "America speaks with one voice," Bush said after the vote. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said much the same thing, but it was never quite that simple. "This is the Tonkin Gulf resolution all over again," West Virginia Democratic senator Robert Byrd warned his colleagues. "Let us stop, look, and listen. Let us not give this President or any President unchecked power. Remember the Constitution." From his perch in Baghdad, Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Tawab Al-Mulah Huwaish termed the administration's insistence that Iraq retained chemical and biological weapons "a lie" and offered to let U.S. officials inspect any manufacturing facility it harbored suspicions about. "If the American administration is interested in inspecting these sites, then they're welcome to come over and have a look for themselves," he said. Those who feared America was rushing needlessly into war asserted that Iraq was not a threat to the United States, and that the no-fly zones, U.N. sanctions, and other measures had put Saddam in a box from which he could not easily maneuver -- and that, in any event, no attack appeared imminent. In the White House, Bush believed that one lesson of 9/11 was that you never knew for sure when an attack was coming. "Some have said that we must not act until the threat is imminent," Bush said in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address. "But trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy and it is not an option." Regarding Iran, the Bush administration deferred to European-led nonproliferation protocols; in North Korea, Bush himself pushed for -- and got -multi-party talks designed to pressure Kim Jong Il. But when it came to Iraq, the administration was busy lining up military allies. On November 8, 2002, Bush secured a 15-0 vote in the U.N. Security Council authorizing the return of weapons inspectors and promising "serious consequences" if Iraq did not cooperate. The clock was ticking. On March 17, Bush made a nationally televised speech giving Saddam 48 hours to give up power or face an invasion. Two nights later, the war began. In the midst of his March 19, 2003, speech informing Americans that the invasion had been launched, Bush paused to speak directly to the U.S. armed forces. It was then 4 a.m. in Baghdad. The rationale for war, he told the troops, was based on human rights.

"To all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you," Bush said. Nineteen months later, 1,100 American soldiers, sailors, and Marines had been killed, and 7,500 wounded. Another 138 men fighting in the coalition forces have died, entire cities are off-limits to foreigners, and a terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda has kidnapped and beheaded civilians from numerous countries and detonated bombs that have killed thousands of Iraqi citizens. The capture of Saddam and the killing of his sons did nothing to alleviate the chaos -- and the crisis in Iraq emerged as the central issue in the 2004 general election. "The President has made, I regret to say, a colossal error of judgment," Kerry said in the first presidential debate. He was speaking for millions of disillusioned Americans. Bush responded, as he has throughout the election season, that progress is being made, that elections are coming to Iraq in January, and that someday Americans will look back on the sacrifices that were made with pride. "I think it's worth it because I know in the long term, a free Iraq, a free Afghanistan will set such a powerful example in a part of the world that's so desperate for freedom," Bush replied. "It will change the world so we can look back and say we did our duty."