Bush-Cheney '04

At the beginning of the fall semester, I made a drastic decision. As a registered Republican on one of America’s most notoriously liberal campuses, I have had to adjust to the widespread eye rolls and exasperated sighs that greet every criticism of the president elected to reshape the world after eight years of the loathed Bush-Cheney administration. While the ubiquity of bleeding heart liberals at an Ivy League university was not unexpected upon my arrival in Cambridge two years ago, it quickly became obvious to me that steadfast support for President Obama springs from something deeper than a young idealist with a supposedly intransigent moral compass becoming disgusted about Bush’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Continued support for Obama in liberal circles is truly stunning, especially considering this summer’s revelations about the administration’s blatant disregard for privacy and fundamental liberties. In order to call attention to the fact that the election of progressive hero Barack Obama has yielded two more terms for the iniquities of his Republican predecessors, I decided to affix a Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign sticker to the front of my laptop.

This decision was not made lightly. After all, while moderate, “squishy” conservatives may be semi-tolerable on Harvard’s campus, the disdain for the Bush administration that propelled Obama into office is still in vogue, both within GOP circles and without. Throughout the nation, coming out as a Bush fan is still considered taboo and may remain so for some time; only recently has political consensus allowed even the most loyal of Democrats to reveal their affinity for little-respected Jimmy Carter.

In light of prevailing opinion, it should seem clear that the prominent placement of my Bush-Cheney sticker should be read with due irony. However, this has not been the case. “You are a Republican,” I am told. “People might think you, like, actually like them!”

I am not particularly worried about curious students inaccurately interpreting my political beliefs. I am confident that those who know me understand my abhorrence of the previous administration’s contemptuous attitude toward civil liberties and its frequent skirting of the Constitution in favor of its own murky ends. However, the sticker is not meant to be a prop in an elaborately staged “How well do you really know me?” game but rather a device of old-fashioned political agitation. My goal is to elicit the combination of unease and visceral disgust from those on this campus trained to treat Bush-Cheney fandom as an unpardonable and incomprehensible offense.

I want the young, party-line Democrats around me to ask themselves why they consider Bush such a dismal president. Nowadays, people might cite his role in causing the financial crisis, but the Bush-Cheney tandem became personae non gratae well before the markets crashed. Six years ago, most of the complaints lodged against the Bush administration involved heinous executive power abuses. A quick trip down memory lane will reveal back to the embroilment in Middle East imbroglios, unconstitutional Guantanamo Bay detentions, and Patriot Act wiretapping questionable on both ethical and legal grounds.

A year into the second term of President Obama, the man elected to bring “change we can believe in” has largely discarded his ambitious domestic agenda—most notably by delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act—in favor of casting his lot with the Bush era neoconservatives, who increasingly find themselves at odds with the Republican Party they once helmed. The president has bolstered Bush’s unmanned drone program, even going so far as to state that it has the legal authority to kill American citizens at its will, as long as the administration determines the citizen to meet the vague standard of being “engaged in combat.” Like Bush and Cheney, Obama seems to believe his war-making powers to be unlimited, extending beyond drone strikes into the insistence that he can go to war even if Congress, the body given the constitutional right to declare war, votes against it.

Furthermore, Obama seems to believe he has not only the authority to kill potentially dangerous Americans but also the power to spy on every single one of them. Among the many revelations in the summer’s NSA scandal was the fact that no email or phone conversation is safe from the intruding eyes of bureaucrats in the Obama administration. This includes the private records of journalists, who have been targeted as potential obstacles to Obama’s consolidation of power.

While unlikely to exert any real pushback against Obama’s continued transgressions against civil liberties, I hope that my Bush-Cheney sticker will at least address the climate that allowed these offenses to take place so frequently. Blinded by optimism, rhetoric, and party ID, too many citizens placed blissful trust in their new, thankfully-not-Bush leader. As a country, we cannot let this happen again.  All I ask when you see my red, white, and blue laptop ornamentation is to ruminate on how we can avoid electing even more Bush-Cheneys in the future.

John F. M. Kocsis ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays. Follow him on Twitter @jfmkocsis.