Presidents Obama and Bush are good friends now, but they wouldn't be in President Bush held a grudge. While campaigning in 2007 and 2008, Senator Obama laid every cultural crime at the feet of the outgoing Republican. And when the housing crisis hit, and he made the economy worse with a stimulus package for government union employees just as President Biden did in 2021, President Obama blamed Bush - even though Bush warned in 2005 that forcing banks to justify why they turned down a mortgage while insuring bad housing loans, at the demand of Democrats, is what led to the housing bubble.

On science, President Obama promised to 'lift the ban' on human embyronic stem cell research and allied journalists played along, without noting that hESC research was not banned, President Bush was the first to fund it. It was President Clinton who refused to fund it, and pushed it off to Bush. The 'ban' that never existed was only slightly modified to allow a few more lines.

He canceled the Bush program returning us to the moon so he could wipe it out and replace it with one that had his own name on it, promising a return to Mars that never materialized.


From The Trouble With Speechwriters

Yet the worst thing he inflicted upon America to wipe out the legacy of President Bush was trashing No Child Left Behind, which was working well, (at least if you care about diversity, equity, and inclusion) and replacing it with his own Common Core. Like Obamacare, it is a poor way to be remembered. 

Common Core has been so bad even California, a loyal one-party state, is undermining it again. Common Core wiped out cursive instruction, despite at least some evidence that handwriting skills aid other intellectual development. I joked that future security of top secret documents would be insured by writing them in cursive; like thousands of years of history.

Does it really matter? You can get a 'Doctorate' in Education, but that doesn't mean you'll know anything about education, because it relies on new fads replacing old ones the same way diet fads do. The science around benefits of cursive writing is as bad as food epidemiology (e.g. IARC - chewing gum causes cancer) but at least kids will be able to read the Declaration of Independence again.