One person we’ve seen very little of tonight is “W”. It figures, really – we barely saw him during the campaign, so why now?
It’s interesting to wonder what kind of peacetime leader Bush Jr would have been. We will never know. More than any president in the past three decades, his time in office was dominated by one event and its aftermath.
How will history judge him? It’s hard to say. In America, even now, there is a great deal of ambivalence about the past eight years. Americans I respect said during the campaign that if it were fought on the economy, Obama would win; if it were fought on foreign policy, it would be close.
In Europe and around the world, things are more black and white: Bush made mistakes, and America is in most respects less popular globally than it has been for many, many years.