The vanishing act of Dubya



Yes, the missing person in the picture would be George W. Bush, now seemingly under party house arrest back in Texas as Romney runs as far away as he can get from Bush and his White House tenure. Memories of the junior Bush economic hangover haunt not only President Obama, still struggling to recover from it, but also the Republican who wants Bush's old job.

At a time when his rival Obama plans a closing campaign swing with former two-term President Bill Clinton, Romney keeps Dubya on the sidelines and out of mind. He's obviously fearful voters will be reminded of what the previous Republican president wrought domestically and abroad in his eight-year reign.

In the second presidential debate, when Romney was asked by an undecided voter how he differed from the junior President Bush, he pleaded that they were "different people and these are different times." He said he would "crack down on China" and balance the budget but "President Bush didn't," and he would focus on small business whereas "the party" focused more on big business. And he said he would do away with "Obamacare," which was barely a twinkle in Obama's eye when Bush was president.

Obama shot back that the country was losing 800,000 jobs a month when he took over from Bush, and then created 5.2 million jobs over 31 straight months. He left unmentioned the 8 percent unemployment that lingered, but noted that the Bush tax cuts were "what took us from surplus (in the Clinton years) to surplus."

Then Obama went on to suggest that Romney was even worse than Bush. "George Bush didn't propose turning Medicare into a voucher," he said. "George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform. He didn't call for self-deportation" -- a reference to Romney's suggestion that illegal aliens take themselves back to their countries and apply for legal immigration. "George Bush never suggested he would eliminate Planned Parenthood."

Romney remained silent as Obama thus pitched for support from Hispanics and women. Left unsaid by the president was Bush's war of choice in Iraq, which Romney supported. He also had originally disagreed with Obama's timetable for a 2014 withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan. That latter subject came up in the third debate, with Romney now agreeing with the president, the latest evidence of his reconversion from being "severely conservative" back to his Massachusetts moderation.

In all this, the 43rd president of the United States remained the little man who wasn't there, as far as Mitt Romney was concerned -- or at least he wished it to be so. All through Romney's campaign for the GOP nomination and thereafter, Dubya continued in Republican circles to be a bad memory to be wiped away with the perceived glory years of Ronald Reagan.


Obama obviously hopes that campaigning down the stretch with Bill Clinton will help Democrats and independents harken back to better economic times. Meanwhile, Republicans try to get more comfortable with Romney -- with no Dubya in sight to remind voters of times and a president they'd rather forget.


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