Why bush is better than obama

The elite intellectuals' rise to prominence was especially noticeable in Democratic Party politics, and demonstrated best by Adlai Stevenson — the party's presidential standard-bearer in and '56 — who both embodied and made use of the Democrats' growing reputation as the party of the brainy avant garde.

As Stevenson eventually learned, being an "egghead" — a term famously used to describe him — was not always a good thing in electoral politics.

But being associated with the educated and sophisticated set did have its political advantages: It lent the Democrats a certain cultural cachet as the party that governed with expertise. And Stevenson's successor to the Democratic presidential nomination would do a far better job of accentuating those advantages. John Kennedy understood the glamour and mystique that intellectuals could bring to a White House.

The only president to win a Pulitzer Prize in for Profiles in Courage , Kennedy worked to secure intellectual support for his presidential campaign through the Academic Advising Committee — a group of professors from elite universities, brought together by Ted Sorensen, who coordinated policy proposals and academic endorsements. Kennedy saw intellectuals as opinion-shapers of the liberal establishment, and thought that by being identified with them, he could reinforce his own elite establishment credentials.

According to Sorensen, Kennedy even saw himself as "something of an ivory tower president. In addition to tapping prominent academics to serve in cabinet posts and as White House advisors, Kennedy even created a role for an administration "in-house intellectual" — a job specifically designed for and filled by historian Arthur Schlesinger. Schlesinger laid out his vision of the job in a memo to Kennedy written during the post-election transition.

The historian saw himself as part cultural advisor, part liaison to the academy and the world of ideas, and part one-man liberal idea factory. He also knew that his role would incorporate a political purpose: to make the left feel better about Kennedy. By shunning any particular policy responsibility, Schlesinger excluded himself from Kennedy's inner circle, and his activities suggest that he was kept at a distance from key policy decisions and debates.

In his time at the White House, Schlesinger wrote articles and film reviews for various publications, corresponded with the nation's intellectual and cultural elites, advised Kennedy on assorted cultural matters, worked with Americans for Democratic Action to promote the liberal agenda, and accumulated research for the book he eventually wrote about the Kennedy White House. In short, Arthur Schlesinger was paid a handsome salary to be Arthur Schlesinger. From Kennedy's perspective, he was worth every penny — not only as a link to intellectuals who offered important public support like Archibald Cox and John Kenneth Galbraith , but, it turned out, also as a guardian of the Kennedy legacy.

In no small part because of Schlesinger and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Thousand Days , the Kennedy mystique endured long after the president's untimely death — sustained by this narrative of intellectual seriousness and cultural sophistication. No president until Barack Obama managed to win the trust and adoration of American intellectuals as Kennedy did.

The reasons have as much to do with changes in the culture of elite American intellectuals as with the attitudes of subsequent presidents.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, was not nearly as well suited to attract the adulation of the smart set: The Texan was uneasy with the liberal, East Coast intellectual community, and its members more than repaid his unease — generally viewing "Uncle Cornpone" as some kind of reactionary southern demagogue, even as he advanced the liberal agenda far more effectively than Kennedy had.

Johnson did follow Kennedy's example of hiring a court intellectual to help burnish his image and manage his relations with the academy and the world of high culture. But Johnson's choice, Princeton history professor Eric Goldman, ended up reinforcing rather than mitigating the perception that Johnson was anti-intellectual. As the anti-Vietnam War movement heated up, Goldman found himself caught between his boss and the worlds of the academy and the arts, where opposition to the war was growing.

American intellectuals were becoming radicalized, and the norms of the elite establishment no longer governed their behavior.

These changes came to the surface in , when Goldman was assigned to organize a White House Festival of the Arts, intended in large part to boost Johnson's reputation among the intelligentsia.

The event achieved just the opposite: One prominent invitee, the poet Robert Lowell, publicly pulled out to protest Johnson's Vietnam policies; cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, another invitee, attended but circulated a petition supporting Lowell's protest against the war. These actions prompted the prim and proper White House social secretary Bess Abell to tell Goldman that "these people of yours — and this festival — have done nothing but cause trouble for the President.

In the late s and early '70s, particularly as a result of the Vietnam debate though also in connection with the broader culture war then heating up , America's elite intellectuals — from perches at leading universities, prominent publications, and key cultural institutions — gradually transformed themselves from the voice of the establishment to the leading edge of a newly radicalized liberalism.

Johnson's attempts to contend with this change would come to embody the Democrats' approach to presidential relations with American intellectuals — offering symbolic gestures meant to borrow some cultural cachet, while often ignoring the intellectuals' substantive views on policy questions.

Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, pursued what would become a Republican model for contending with the radicalization of the academy and the arts: the elevation and cultivation of alternative intellectuals, men and women disenchanted by the radicalism of their colleagues and more inclined toward cultural and political conservatism.

In this way, Republicans actually came to give intellectuals more meaningful roles in the management of the government, while liberals tended to employ them for symbolism and cover. Nixon's in-house intellectual was a thorn in the side of many liberals: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A Harvard professor who had served as assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations where he gained notoriety for a report warning about the collapse of the black family , Moynihan had little patience for the increasing radicalism of many fellow academics.

He was and always remained a Democrat, but by the time Nixon was elected in , Moynihan was part of the emerging neoconservative movement of intellectuals disenchanted with the left. And Nixon was drawn to the possibility of offering up his own intellectuals to oppose those of the liberal intelligentsia he so detested.

As urban-affairs advisor and later in the nebulous role of "counselor to the president," Moynihan wrote a number of brilliant memoranda for Nixon, criticizing liberal elites for the very excesses that had brought about Moynihan's own disenchantment, from cultural radicalism to misguided welfare policies.

His enmity toward the radical left was repaid in kind and then some : In one memo, Moynihan wrote to the president that "yesterday in Cambridge the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] announced that my house would be burned during the night.

Moynihan eventually left the White House under a cloud of controversy after liberals attacked his recommendation that the administration adopt a policy of "benign neglect" toward the black community. Moynihan's intent in the memo was to encourage the administration to dial down its racial rhetoric so as not to send the black community into the arms of radical black leaders.

But when his memo on the subject was leaked to the New York Times quite possibly by a young Leon Panetta , the subsequent, sensationalized front-page story put Moynihan at the center of yet another controversy involving race. Civil-rights leaders and liberal journalists responded with outrage, and the furor made Moynihan's continued tenure at the White House impossible.

Despite his difficulties, however, Moynihan played an important role in the development of a conservative intellectual response to liberalism.

In his informal role as intellectual liaison, Moynihan tried to encourage Nixon to cultivate conservative intellectuals to defend the Republican point of view. As Moynihan wrote in a long memo to Nixon, "No one writes articles for us, much less books, plays, or folk songs.

As Moynihan described this process at the New York Times , "every time one of [the veterans] goes and is replaced by a new recruit from the Harvard Crimson or whatever, the Maoist faction on West 43d Street gets one more vote.

No one else applies. The solution to these twin problems, Moynihan argued, was to have Nixon begin associating with academics and intellectuals who understood what he was up to, and who could amplify Nixon's agenda "on the basis of their special competencies.

Some of the people Moynihan suggested should be invited to meet with the president included James Q. None of them ended up filling Moynihan's shoes, but Moynihan did begin the process of putting non-liberal intellectuals, including some thinkers who were emerging as neoconservatives, on the White House radar screen. He established a model for what a more conservative, or at least a non-liberal, intellectual — one expressly out of line with the mainstream of the academy and highbrow culture — could do in the White House.

It was a model subsequent Republican presidents, beginning with Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, would look to and build upon.

During Ford's brief tenure, the White House intellectual-in-residence was political-philosophy professor Robert Goldwin — the first out-and-out conservative to serve in such a role.

Moynihan, for all of his neoconservative tendencies, reverted back to liberalism after winning election as a Democratic U. While Goldwin had significant intellectual credentials — as a professor at the University of Chicago and Kenyon College, and later as dean of St. John's College — he served less as a policy advisor, and more as a link between the president and the burgeoning conservative intellectual world. Wilson were beginning to build a kind of elite case for populism in American politics — for defending traditional American values against a radical onslaught led by the left-leaning intellectuals, who increasingly inhabited the upper tiers of America's educational and cultural institutions.

It was these conservative intellectuals whom Goldwin invited to meet with and advise President Ford; he made no pretense of serving as a liaison to his more liberal academic colleagues. Median household income was down 4. But median household income leaped 5. Still, a big debate awaits us on how we further improve wage growth to ensure middle-class prosperity. Considering that under Bush, corporations did worse than under Obama, household income still fell and private sector jobs were lost, perhaps conservative economic policies should not be our North Star.

The cost of Medicare and Medicaid threatened to eat the budget alive. The No. Bush created the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. It helped seniors with prescription drug costs up to a point, known as the "doughnut hole.

In , Obama pushed through the Affordable Care Act. Its goal is to reduce healthcare costs. The benefits it provides were realized after Obamacare closed the Medicare doughnut hole. More importantly, it provides health insurance for everyone. That cuts healthcare costs by allowing more people to afford preventive health care.

They could treat their illnesses before they become catastrophic. Fewer people rely on expensive emergency room care. The costs of Obamacare were paid for with a variety of taxes. Both presidents advocated more free trade agreements. He also signed bilateral agreements with Australia in , Bahrain in , Chile in , Jordan in , Morocco in , Oman in , and Singapore in The Obama administration negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It didn't finish the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership before the end of his term. Congress awarded him a "fast track" trade promotion authority in June Obama had success with bilateral agreements in South Korea in , Colombia in , Panama in , and Peru in These bilateral trade agreements granted favored trading status between the United States and these countries. Obama supported the passage of free trade agreements as part of the American Jobs Act.

But he didn't fulfill his campaign promise to review all trade agreements to make sure they didn't cause job losses. Bush passed the Bankruptcy Prevention Act.

The act made it difficult for people to declare bankruptcy. As a result, they relied on home equity loans instead. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.

It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.