Ron Fournier writes what he knows, and what he knows better than just about anything these days is that President Obama’s second term is unraveling just like George W. Bush’s second term.
After reading “Days of Fire,” a chronicle of the Bush-Cheney era, Fournier wrote Tuesday that he “found a striking number of parallels between Bush’s fifth year in office and the atrocious first 12 months of President Obama’s second term.”
Fournier then went on to detail several “analogues between Bush’s 2005 and Obama’s 2013.” There’s the misguided claim of a second term mandate, as well as “arrogance and overreach” by both administrations.
“Bush and Obama made the same mistake. Both men convinced themselves that they were reelected because of their agendas, rather than because of negative campaign strategies that essentially disqualified their rivals—Democrat John Kerry and Republican Mitt Romney,” he wrote.
Then there are the parallels between the increased carnage in Iraq that followed Bush’s re-election and the federal health insurance website glitches that defined the first year of Obama’s second term.
“In both cases, luck ran out after Election Day,” Fournier wrote.
Just as Bush neglected to acknowledge the public’s unease with the Iraq war, Fournier said that Obama similarly failed to take responsibility. Both presidents, Fournier wrote, “also shared an allergy to firing people.”
Bush’s infamously slow response to Hurricane Katrina, Fournier observed, is comparable to the Obama administration’s decision to press on with the Affordable Care Act’s rollout and downplay the website’s problems.
And don’t you dare blame GOP intransigence.
“The Obama White House and its apologists seem to forget the zero-sum game tactics of Bush-era Democrats when they criticize congressional Republicans (accurately) for making presidential destruction a singular goal,” Fournier wrote.
If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because Obama-Bush comparisons have secured a place next to “leadership” analysis in the Fournier repertoire.
In October, Fournier compared the Obamacare rollout to both Katrina and Iraq during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He revisited the comparison a month later with a column that enshrined “Obama’s Katrina” as a Beltway meme.
