Postcards From The Bush Years
Elections have consequences. Sometimes incredibly bad ones.
The following are memories shared by people who lived through the administration of George W. Bush. (I’ve cut a few for length but otherwise not altered anything.) Share your own memory here.
“What’s hard to remember now is how much we all did believe that Gore and Bush were each, in their own way, bad choices, just like many people believe Trump and Clinton are now. Bush ran as a ‘compassionate conservative’ who governed in a bipartisan way, and he hearkened back to his dad, who really was a centrist Republican of the old school. When he chose Dick Cheney as his vice president, I didn’t know enough of Cheney’s history to be worried. It was only after the election, when GOP operatives staged a violent rally during the recount (now known as the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’), that I started to realize just how bad the next four years might be.” —Michele T.
“I was a senior in high school during the 2000 election. I was also bullied pretty badly — I was/am nerdy, female, queer and regularly singled out for praise by teachers/authority figures. My big memory from the election run up and the following vote counting was how empowered the worst of my personal bullies was. He was catholic, white, and from a politically conservative family. He used the bush campaign and Bush’s win in his bullying, saying things like: America agrees that ‘people like you’ will never have power, ‘people like you’ don’t deserve respect, ‘women like you should be sterilised’. It was dreadful and it all linked back to what he saw as a vindication via the 2000 election of all of his worst impulses.”
“I will always remember Bush’s Inauguration Day, 2001. The weather matched the mood — rainy and gray and chilly, the kind of day you’d stay in and mope regardless of the political currents happening out your window; and there was this feeling, after the recount and with the protests reverberating through downtown DC (I remember coming up the escalator at the Dupont Circle Metro — they worked more reliably then — hearing the chants rattling off the buildings) that something in the great American experiment might have cracked or broken down in Florida, in the fighting over hanging chads and counting votes under equal protection of the law, and an election decided in December in the Supreme Court. We didn’t know 9/11 was coming yet, or Iraq or all the other stuff that was ahead, but it was my first taste of not just feeling my party’s loss, but real, visceral, worry about where things might go in the country, and that the stakes, which had been just 12 weeks earlier notional or academic to folks who stayed home (or voted Nader thinking they had the room to make that protest), were suddenly very, very real — and that we were about to live them, past the point of choice or change.” — Patrick D.
“I remember his reaction from 9/11. I remember the WOMD and finding out it was a lie. I remember my cousin going to war and not coming back okay.” — K.L.
“After invading Iraq on the manufactured pretense that it had weapons of mass destruction, Bush recorded a video for the 2004 Correspondents Dinner where he walked around the White House looking under couch cushions for the missing WMDs, saying things like, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.” Just beyond offensive how few fucks they gave about the consequences of their lies! By that point the Iraq Body Count project estimates 10,000 people had died as a result of the invasion.” —Patrick M.
“My husband suffered a traumatic brain injury on March 17, 2003. He was in a coma for a week. When he had started waking up and could be moved out of the ICU he was in a bed with a television. Someone turned it on and as his awareness and memory came back online he watched constant news footage of the invasion. He couldn’t figure out if he’d gone back in time to Vietnam, or forward some unknown years into the future where we could suddenly be landing troops on foreign soil and taking territory. He didn’t retain new memories for very long, so we did this reorientation about the war hundreds of times over the next few months, sometimes with our 11 year old son. It was one of the saddest and most wearing jobs I’ve ever had in a lifetime spent doing crisis intervention and public policy. I could perform one of those conversations verbatim now, and I still have them in my dreams.” —APo
“In July of 2004, one of my friends from high school was killed in Iraq. He had enlisted in the military shortly after 9/11 and was eventually sent to a country that had NOTHING TO DO with 9/11. What I remember most vividly is the conversation I had with my parents over dinner just a few days prior to his death. I expressed some surprise over my friend’s decision to enlist, given my lack of faith in our country’s Commander in Chief. A few days later he was dead, because of tremendously terrible and intentional choices made by the person elected to lead our country. Elections have consequences.”
“This is going to be too kind to W, and to Cheney, Rumsfeld and etc., because they certainly deserve all the scorn and derision we can muster. But my memory of the Bush years isn’t about them. It’s about the rest of us, and how fear, and grief, and anger led so many people in this country to give that administration real, life-and-death power over millions of people in our name. Because I worked in journalism at the time, my memories are mainly of how media failed at that critical moment. There’s a bit, possibly apocryphal, about a story meeting at a major news organization in the week before W launched the attack on Iraq. Editors were debating coverage, angles, what to say about the mayhem to come. ‘I don’t know,’ a junior editor said. ‘I just don’t think the Administration has really proven its case that Iraq is a credible threat to the U.S., especially around the WMDs.’ And the corporate Big Cheese attending the meeting turned to the junior editor and said, in a low rumble that everyone in the room still heard, and understood: ‘Oh? And who the fuck are you?’ And, really, that was the challenge of that time: A large group of elites saying, to the rest of us, we are going to do these things, and who the fuck are you.” —Mark C.
“Watching boots hit the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq was one of the worst moments of my life. My dad is a Vietnam veteran who was badly, badly injured in the war. I remember crying in my senior year of high school (2002–2003) and saying that this was going to be another Vietnam, that I just knew it was going to last forever and be terrible. Being aware of the way that Bush was squandering the country’s reputation, the damage we were doing in other countries, and watching boys from my rural farming community go off to war… I’ve never felt so powerless and so helpless. I think all the time about what the world would have looked like if Al Gore had been president on 9/11. I think about the generation of little kids who have grown up in war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terrorism that will be waged as a result of our actions. It’s breath-takingly sad.”
“I remember when my friends started getting deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. It didn’t take hold for me personally until my friend Ben was abusing Oxycontin and sleeping on my couch because he was a Marine sniper who saw some things I don’t think he should have seen. Recounting tales of watching people’s heads explode — sometimes even children, because they were carrying guns. It was terrifying watching sweet Ben, a kind person who used to sit behind me in math class… break down. I distinctly remember him crying on my couch and blaming President Bush for something so pointless and stupid. Ben committed suicide in September 2007. Thanks for the memories, President Bush.” —Shane
“What I mostly remember from the run-up to the Iraq war was feeling helpless. The largest anti-war demonstrations in history were held, here and elsewhere. People in the millions were out on the streets against this stupid, pointless war, and it made no impact at all on the debate. Bush didn’t care what the people thought, the congress was too scared of seeming to not care about terrorism to stand up to him, and all we could do was wait and try to vote him out. When Kerry lost in 2004 by a close margin, I woke up in the middle of the night with all my muscles clenched. In my office full of young creative types, it was like someone dear to us had died.” — Michele T.
“When the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib came out in 2004, and all these people were talking about how it surely would affect the election, and then — as I suspected would happen — Bush was reelected pretty handily. It was a very depressing moment to realize how little effect this kind of disgrace to our nation could have on voters, if people were sufficiently fearful of a threat to themselves and uncaring about others.”
“It’s not a moment so much as the constant fear that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would die and there would be five far right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, something an election couldn’t fix. Some third-party voters claimed there was ‘no difference’ between the parties, but no one could reasonably argue that Bush and Gore (or Trump and Clinton) would appoint similar judges.”
“I remember feeling really angry when W. tried to get people to get excited about privatizing Social Security. One of the government programs that works really well, and that should be expanded. And then realizing how much of a disaster that would have been, in the years after that when the recession hit and the stock market crashed.”
“I spent two semesters in Europe in 2004 and then again in 2005, after W was reelected. I remember clearly how much sympathy the people had for Americans, even as they loathed W and the war. We did a lot of drinking and commiserating because I also struggled to understand why my country was doing this. Then that sympathy turned to incredulous frustration. I couldn’t explain how he’d been reelected. I could only apologize.”
