Bush & Obama: Still Not Buddies
The New York Times reports on the relationship between Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush.
On his first visit back to the White House after leaving the presidency, George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office with his successor, President Obama, for a briefing on the earthquake in Haiti. It was January 2010 — nearly a year to the day after Mr. Bush left office — and it seemed, at the time, like a door might be opening between the two men.
But the door, it seems, has remained closed. Seven months would pass before they spoke again.
That conversation took place on Tuesday, hours before Mr. Obama strode into the Oval Office and informed the nation that he was ending America’s combat mission in Iraq, the war he had opposed since Mr. Bush started it. The conversation was brief and perfunctory, former Bush aides said. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, called it “a cordial discussion.”
There is, of course, no obligation for presidents to keep in touch with their predecessors, and there is no evidence that Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush bear any ill will toward each other. But their relations do seem particularly awkward — or, more precisely, nonexistent.
That is most likely a result of the politics of the moment. Since the outset of his presidency, Mr. Obama has lamented that he inherited two unfinished wars and an economy in grave recession — a not-so-subtle dig at Mr. Bush, even if Mr. Obama rarely mentions him by name. And as he travels around the country campaigning for fellow Democrats, Mr. Obama has been likening the economy to a car and complaining that Republicans “drove the car into a ditch.”That can make for pretty short conversation. The two leaders ran into each other in August 2009 at the funeral of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, but did not speak. In January, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Bush and former President Bill Clinton to join hands to raise money for Haiti, which gave rise to Mr. Bush’s White House visit. (Mr. Clinton was also there.)
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