The Presidents on A&E

This weekend I spent some quality time with our 43 U.S. Presidents courtesy of the A&E network. The eight hour series was shown last week, and thanks to TiVo, I was able to make much shorter work of it.

I'm not sure when the series was originally created, though it had been updated for Bush's reelection. It was not an in-depth examination of the presidents - you couldn't do that in 8 hours - but it did touch on the high and low points of each man's administration, and overall I thought it was pretty well done....at least until they got to the last episode which covered 1977 through today.

I didn't really detect much in the way of bias in the presentation of the program until the last hour which discussed Carter through Bush 43. Carter was portrayed as a brilliant guy who did miracles in the middle east, but the show more or less glossed over Carter's mishandling of the economy and the resulting inflation and soaring interest rates. It discussed the Iran hostage mess that cost him the presidency, but didn't bother to address the fact that Carter made the country look weak and ineffective in the eyes of the bad guys in the world. Thank God Reagan came along and quickly fixed that problem.

I found it interesting that Carter was also the only president interviewed on camera for this show. Although Ford, Clinton and both Bush's were alive and healthy when the show was created, none of them appeared on camera. Carter was definitely spinning his accomplishments to make himself appear in the best light.

The show, through the journalists that were interviewed, also tried to make Carter the glowing example of what a former president should be. Yes, Carter has done some good things through Habitat for Humanity, but there was no mention of his constant harping at Bush, usually on foreign soil, or the fact that his Nobel prize was earned for an agreement on which North Korea later reneged, and the fact that the Nobel committee gave the award to Carter as a slap at Bush.

The next problem in the program occurred at the end of the segment on Bush 41. Bush's famous "no new taxes" pledge was violated when he agreed to huge tax increases in 1991. Breaking that pledge was immediately used by the Dems to ridicule Bush and probably cost him the election. In the very least it paved the way for Ross Perot to come along and steal Bush votes, putting Clinton in office with only 43% of the vote.

The way the show ended the Bush 41 segment was the problem. The supposition of one of the journalists was that the Bush tax increase was "bad for Bush, but good for the nation". His theory was that the tax increase paved the way for the economic boom of the 90's. Rubbish.

Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that tax increases do not stimulate the economy, but in fact rob capital from the economy thus slowing down activity. Had the Bush tax increases not taken place, the recovery, due in large part to Reagan's economic programs of the 80's, would have taken off even faster and probably would have left the economy in much better shape as Bush 41 was facing reelection. I think the journalists feel that the tax increases were good for the country because they paved the way for the Clinton presidency.

My final problem with the show was the way they treated Bush 43. In the brief synopsis (which they did on each president) he was described as "lacking curiosity". This is a euphemism the left uses for "stupid". You see, you are said to "lack curiosity" if you have firm ideas and beliefs, and are so solidly rooted in those values that you are not interested in hearing what the opposition has to say (I guess I'm sort of like that - that's why there aren't any comments allowed on this site).

What's really going on with W is that he just doesn't care how the Dems feel about his plans and programs. He's going to go with them regardless of the opposition.

Since the show chose to interview only liberal journalists to discuss Bush, I shouldn't be surprised how it came out. One of the main sources who appeared frequently was Evan Thomas of Newsweek. Thomas is the guy who stated early in the 2004 campaign that favorable press coverage of Kerry would be worth 15 points. I guess it's a good thing Kerry got that favorable coverage or else he would have lost by 18 instead of by 3.

To the credit of A&E I did learn quite a bit about past presidents, but I wish they could have been a little more balanced in their assessment of the more recent leaders.