The First Report Card on the Bush MBA Presidency

• Author: Michael W. Popejoy
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02317.x
• Date: 01 January 2011

128 Public Administration Review • January | February 2011

presidents somehow from best to worst in line of

succession.

Recently, a billboard portrayed President Jimmy

Carter exclaiming that since President Barack Obama

was elected, he was no longer the worst president in

history. We shall see later, as the political scientists

rush to judge the Obama administration in what is

most likely to be a single-term presidency, similar to

Carter’s. Later, historians might even try to rehabili-

tate a bad presidential experience such as Richard

Nixon after suf‌f‌i cient years have passed and many wit-

nesses are deceased. Carter, Obama, and even Nixon

may be deemed smarter presidents by historians than

we are aware today—or so it would seem.

 is edited book by Colin Provost and Paul Teske is

the f‌i rst run through the political science colander of

George W. Bush’s (often called Bush II) two terms

in of‌f‌i ce. For the “quants,” it is a blessing with its pie

charts, tables, equations, bar charts, histograms, and

so on.  e data presented would f‌i ll a large f‌l ip chart

with all the analyses that are so characteristic of the

political science discipline.  ere is so much analytical

work crammed into this small volume that exponen-

tial smoothing would not reduce the “quant” burden

Colin Provost and Paul Teske, eds., President George

W. Bush’s Inf‌l uence over Bureaucracy and Policy:

Extraordinary Times, Extraordinary Powers (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 232 pp. $95.00

(cloth), ISBN: 9780230605949.

It seems natural that after every change in

presidential administration, a changing of the

guard if you will, and while the new president

is still f‌i tting himself into his new chair in the Oval

Of‌f‌i ce, the political scientists rush to publish their

evaluations of the previous occupant’s legacy. Later,

sometime between the political scientists and the

historians, will come the public administrationists’

attempts to evaluate the outcomes of presidential

policies and initiatives. We are interested in the

Hoosian outcomes (named for the late Ida Hoos,

who added the outcomes metric to the original three

boxes of the general systems theory model), whereas

the political science people are interested in metrics

that allow for reasonably valid comparisons between

administrations.  is is not an unusual process, nor

is it a bad one; it is just well expected. We cannot

help ourselves—we must evaluate every president’s

contribution or lack thereof to the commonweal,

and then, for whatever reason, we must rank the

 e First Report Card on the Bush MBA Presidency

Michael W. Popejoy

Central Michigan University and Florida International University

Michael W. Popejoy is an off-campus

part-time program professor at Central

Michigan University and an adjunct

professor at Florida International University,

Stempel School of Public Health and Social

Work. His research interests include both

global public health partnerships between

public administration and public health, and

the history and founding of public admin-

istration. Currently, he is assistant editor of

White House Studies and guest editor

for a two-volume special issue on global

public health for the Journal of Health

and Human Services Administration

and for a special issue of Public Voices on

the founding of public administration.

E-mail: dr_popejoy@hotmail.com