Dubya's Legacy Incites Road Rage

Bush gets schooled on bus: A
coast-to-coast road trip citing the many flubs of the president’s
administration made a Syracuse pit stop last week.

Eight years later, with just 200-odd
days left in Bush’s tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., another bus is
cruising the country and taking aim at McCain, albeit indirectly. The
Bush Legacy Tour bus highlights the failures of George W. and tying the
Arizona senator to the man he would like to succeed. It is a
well-appointed rolling museum, with a timeline laid out on the floor to
guide visitors through a montage of glossy photos, exhibits, digital
displays and videos, all of which cast the Bush years in a most
unflattering light.  

The biodiesel-powered vehicle idled for
two hours on Montgomery Street in Syracuse on July 1, as about 50
people surveyed its exhibits, which touched on every topic from
Hurricane Katrina to the price of gas. Behind the wheel is Joel Parisoe
of Orlando, Fla.; he’s driven the bus just short of 3,000 miles in the
week since the tour began June 24 in Washington, D.C. Parisoe says the
bus gets 6.5 miles to the gallon on biodiesel, better than the 5 mpg it
achieves when burning petroleum diesel. On this first leg of the tour
they’ve only had to use conventional diesel once, he says. In the next
five months the bus is scheduled to visit nearly 150 towns, including
Crawford, Texas, Dubya’s home away from the Beltway. 

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Examining the Bush Legacy Tour bus can
produce a lot of time-warp moments. You may have forgotten about John
Ashcroft before the Patriot Act. It may have slipped your mind that
Bush was on vacation during Katrina, or that he made no mention of the
still-waterlogged Big Easy in his first State of the Union address
after the hurricane. Was the Enron bankruptcy really during the Bush
administration? And the outing of Valerie Plame: How could we forget?
It’s all laid out here, in dense detail.

Then there are the exhibits that really
count. Literally. Along the driver’s side wall (there are no seats on
the bus) is a digital counter that calculates the economic cost of the
Iraq war to New York state; it was in the $47 billion range on this
day. By touching the screen you can figure out the war’s cost on the
residents of Syracuse. If the meter is accurate, Syracusans have paid
about $213 million as of 3 p.m. on July 1.

Next to the Iraq war exhibit is a case
that holds the combat boots of Army SPC Patrick McCaffrey, a California
soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004 by the Iraqi soldiers he was
training. According to his family, the Army waited nine months after
completing an investigation to inform them of the circumstances
surrounding his death.

At the far end of the bus is a mock-up
of an old pre-digital era gas pump with a big W on it. The brand name
on it reads “Bush Cheney Oil.” Next to the pump is another touch-screen
exhibit that allows you to figure out what you already know: Gas prices
have gone through the roof. In fact, prices have tripled since Bush
took the oath of office. The exhibit offers no nuanced analyses of the
price spike, just a placard calling the GOP the “Grand Oil Party.”

Fair and balanced journalism would
demand that a similar bus for the defense of Bush be parked on the
opposite side of the street. But this is not journalism, it is deftly
produced multimedia advocacy, done by the not-for-profit Americans
United for Change, with implausibly deniable links to the Democratic
Party. 

The organization, created to fight
Bush’s 2005 plan to permit individuals to privatize their Social
Security contributions, raised about a million dollars to put the Bush
Legacy Tour on the road. Much of that money came from labor unions. The
Syracuse stop was organized by the local chapter of Citizen Action of
New York.

There is a snotty yet clever edge to the
presentation. If you’ve ever seen those TV commercials with the nerdy
Microsoft guy vs. the cool customer with his Apple, you will especially
enjoy the “conservative vs. progressive” commercial displayed on a
rolling basis (catch it online at www.IamProgress.com) as you enter the
bus. 

To its credit the exhibit does not go
into the 2000 Florida recount or miscount that led to Bush’s first
presidential election win. Apparently organizers determined that there
were enough post-inauguration misdeeds to fill a bus without having to
reach back to the electoral wrangling settled by the Supreme Court. 

According to Julie Blust of Americans
United for Change, who was also traveling with the bus, the tour’s
ultimate destination is far beyond the current political campaign. “The
Bush Legacy Project is not just about Bush. It is about the
conservative ideology he and his allies. . . including John McCain,
represent. It’s time to drive a stake in the heart (sic) of
conservative ideology, which is a failed governing philosophy. The Bush
Legacy Bus is just one piece of any ongoing effort to redefine American
political values and create an enduring progressive majority.” No
flip-flopping here.

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Among those visiting the bus was Lamont
Lawrence, a 28-year-old part-time criminal justice student. The North
Side resident, recently laid off by a medical transport company, was
walking by the bus with his 6-year-old son and his son’s friend, and
decided to take a look. Asked about his reaction to the exhibit, he
shook his head. “It blows your mind,” said Lawrence. “Bush is
outrageous, getting all our young troops killed unnecessarily. We
deserve better.” 

Yet when he was asked if he had voted for Bush in the past, he nodded. “When I did vote, it was for him.” Go figure.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future,
either President Obama or President McCain will gather with dignitaries
in Texas for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
There will be photos of the president with a bullhorn at Ground Zero,
and descriptions of his program for helping people with AIDS in Africa,
and tributes from Tony Blair and the like. To keep the record straight,
the Bush Legacy Tour bus might want to stake out a parking spot just
across the street. 

—Ed Griffin-Nolan