President Bush laid to rest any questions about coming to terms with the end of his presidency during an hourlong question-and-answer session Thursday in front of a conservative think tank audience.
Though he remained engaged with the financial problems of U.S. automakers, Mr. Bush defended the broad expanse of his domestic policy agenda.
Mr. Bush has insisted he was “sprinting to the finish” of his presidency and was in no hurry at the American Enterprise Institute event to end a look back at the past eight years, touching on immigration, Social Security, spending, his relationship with the press and “petty name-calling” in politics.
Mr. Bush has been in the midst of a series of “exit interviews” with TV and newspaper reporters, but none of the interviews lasted as long or focused so tightly on domestic policy as Mr. Bush’s conversation with AEI President Christopher DeMuth.
Later in the day, Mr. Bush, who leaves office in 32 days, sat for an interview with C-SPAN, and quipped, “It turns out that the farewell party for the president stretches over about 45 days, it seems like.”
In defending his actions on two of his biggest defeats — attempts to reform immigration and Social Security — Mr. Bush said he was not obligated to take on those difficult problems but did so out of a sense of duty.
“A president should take on tough problems,” said Mr. Bush, sitting in an arm chair on a small dais next to Mr. DeMuth. “The temptation in politics sometimes is just kick them down the road, like, ’It’s too hard to do, so let’s just let somebody else do it.’”
Mr. Bush has of late criticized some in his own party for their opposition to the immigration reforms he proposed in 2007, saying it has alienated Hispanics.
He conceded that he fell short in pushing for a solution, but, “nevertheless, I feel good about having tried.”
On Social Security, where Mr. Bush unsuccessfully argued that enrollees should be allowed to create private savings accounts, he said he had fulfilled his obligation as president to use the bully pulpit and “lay out a way forward” for problems around the bend.
Mr. Bush blamed Republicans in Congress for filling the federal budget with pork-barrel spending, and complained he was unable to excise pet projects from spending bills.
“Without the line-item veto, the president is in an awkward position when it comes to budgeting,” he said.
But the federal budget is passed in the form of 12 separate appropriations bills, and many conservatives say that Mr. Bush should have vetoed some of those bills, which he did not do until Democrats took control of Congress in 2006.
“We give him a lot of credit for trying to move the ball down the field on Social Security reform, but government spending exploded under the president’s watch - from the 2002 Farm Bill, to the 2005 Transportation Bill, to the explosion of earmarks and now massive bailouts,” said Nachama Soloveichik of the fiscally conservative Club for Growth.
“This kind of spending is going to haunt us for generations to come if we don’t stop soon,” she said.
The federal government has grown in size, in fact, more under Mr. Bush than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During the C-SPAN interview, Mr. Bush said he did not use the veto pen more often “primarily because I was working with people in my own party” until 2006.
Unlike Vice President Dick Cheney, who told The Washington Times in an interview Wednesday that his relationship with the media “didn’t flourish” over the last eight years, Mr. Bush said he had “a good relationship with the press.”
“It requires a lot of work to get along, but I recognize they need me for news and I need them for outlets,” he said.
The major thing Mr. Bush said he would not miss about being president is “the petty name-calling.”
“I have been disappointed at times about the politics of personal destruction. It’s not the first time it’s ever happened in our history, but I was just - I came with the idea of changing the tone in Washington, and frankly didn’t do a very good job of it,” he said.
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