Obama v. Bush

Another fundamental difference between the previous and current. Quick summary: everything Bush did in public was scripted and controlled. Obama has open public meetings that include dissent. It feels good.

Non-Paper Daily, 1.14.2009

*W, at 34%, is leaving the presidency with the second lowest job approval rating of all time... ahead of Nixon... who resigned because he was going to be impeached. It's hard to even include Nixon due to that major caveat, but even if you do, second from the bottom of the barrel isn't so hot. Interestingly, since the election, Bush's approval rating has climbed 9%. My guess is that people feel both sorry for the guy and happy that he's leaving. Whatever the cause, it's worth remember that only 25% of the populace approved of the job Bush did as of November 4th, 2008.

*Last night Barack Obama had dinner with a group of lead conservative commentators. The list: George Will, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot. This morning for breakfast he was joined by a left leaning crowd: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Gerry Seib, Ron Brownstein, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Andrew Sullivan, and Rachel Maddow. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at these conversations.

*Apparently Obama is putting together an unprecedented-in-size grassroots network whose job it will be to push Obama's legislative agenda. He has millions of dollars and millions of people. This should be interesting.

No More Bush. Amen.

Yesterday, George W(!)Bush held his final press conference. Hallelujah! I didn't watch the tape, but apparently he appeared to show some understanding as to the extent he fucked up. No, really, he fucked up. It's easy for people's anger to subside once someone is gone, but it's been a long time (and perhaps unprecedented to this extent) since a president has taken the United States this far backwards. That being said, Kevin put it perfectly when he said let's not forgive and forget too quick, if not for any other reason than avoiding the election of morons like Bush in the future. The excerpt:

I haven't yet watched the press conference myself, so all I can say is: I sure hope Fallows is wrong. It's human nature, of course, for anger over a botched job to recede with time, and perhaps it's also true that anger naturally morphs into other, more complex emotions anyway. How many people today are really angry at Herbert Hoover?

Still, I sure hope that the public doesn't forgive Bush for a very, very long time. To this day I don't understand how such a manifestly unqualified candidate got either nominated or elected in the first place, and the damage this man-child has done to the country during his eight years in office is hard to even put into words. If Barack Obama is lucky, he might — might — by 2016 be able to get us back to where we were in 2000. The last eight years have taken us backward by almost every metric that matters, and as he heads off to Texas, hopefully never to be heard from again, Bush will go down in history as one of the very few presidents to have left the country in demonstrably worse shape than when he got it. It's an elite group indeed.