ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, august 15, 2010 INSIDE
White bread is toast And wheat bread is king. B3
Obama’s D.C. getaways Forget Martha’s Vineyard. You can have fun right here. B2
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 Hyde Park in Beijing Why are the University of Chicago and George Mason heading abroad? B6 Diary of a kidnapping Journalist Jere Van Dyk’s 45 days as a Taliban prisoner. B6 Opening that Golden Gate The stories behind the bridge, from its paint job to its suicides. B6
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Look who’s
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER MORRIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS; WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION On the campaign trail, he’s everyone’s favorite scapegoat by Perry Bacon Jr.
memoir due out in November, after the midterm elections. Yet, with less than three months before
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this fall’s vote, it’s almost as though he nev- er left politics. Democrats have decided to try to win the midterms the same way they won in 2006 and 2008: by blaming any and all problems in the United States on Bush. And as Republicans around the country rally against government spending, even they are turning the ex-president into a convenient foil. Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), the No. 3 Repub-
lican in the House and a potential presi- dential candidate, recently accused Bush
eorge W. Bush is living quietly in Dallas these days, far from Washington’s political news cy- cle. He has traveled to Haiti, joined Facebook and written a
of “runaway spending” that has escalated under President Obama. Former congress- man Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania GOP Sen- ate candidate, has boasted of standing up to Bush on Medicare spending while in Congress. “I opposed President Bush when he wanted to expand and create a new en- titlement program,” Toomey said recently. “I opposed that. I opposed many of our spending bills.” The criticism is natural; after all, Bush
left office with approval ratings in the 20s and 30s, some of the lowest for any presi- dent. But the renewed attacks illustrate shortcomings in both parties. They show a Republican Party that would seemingly rather criticize Bush and Obama than pro- mote its own new ideas. And they point to a Democratic Party that doesn’t appear to believe that its agenda is compelling to voters and simply hopes anti-Bush senti-
campaign continued on B5 Perry Bacon Jr. is a national political reporter for The Washington Post.
Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the editor of the essay collection “The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment,” forthcoming this fall, and the author of the forthcoming “Jimmy Carter.”
W BOOK REVIEW Going how no one has gone before by Peter Carlson
your friends at parties. Facts like these: During a week in space, with no gravity tugging at their spines, astronauts grow two inches taller. Researchers requiring a vomit-like substance for scientific studies use Prog- resso vegetable soup. A V-2 rocket launched in New Mexico in 1947 zoomed wildly off course and crashed three miles from downtown Jua- rez, Mexico. In 1965, astronaut John Young smug- gled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the
B
etween the belly laughs, you learn a lot of surprising stuff in Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars” — the kind of delightfully useless facts that will amaze
PACKING FOR MARS The Curious Science of Life in the Void By Mary Roach Norton. 334 pp. $25.95
Gemini III capsule and into space. During the 1969 Apollo 10 mission, as- tronaut Thomas Stafford noticed an un- pleasantly post-digestive object floating through the weightless cabin, and the of- ficial mission transcript recorded this conversation: “Who did it?” Stafford asked. “I didn’t do it,” Young said. “It ain’t one of mine.” “I don’t think it’s one of mine,” Eugene
Cernan said. And so on.
Roach is America’s funniest science writer. She has made a career of revealing
just how weird the world of science can get. Her first book, “Stiff,” was a darkly comic history of scientific studies in- volving human corpses. Her second book, “Spook,” explored scientific and quasi- scientific studies of the afterlife. Her third, “Bonk,” chronicled the wacky his- tory of sex research. Now, in “Packing for Mars,” she has written a comic survey of space science, with emphasis on the ab- surd, the bizarre and the gross. “What drew me to the topic of space ex-
ploration was not the heroics and adven- ture stories,” she explains, “but the very
space continued on B4
Peter Carlson is a columnist for American History magazine and the author of “K Blows Top,” a nonfiction comedy about Nikita Khrushchev’s adventures in America.
by Julian E. Zelizer
hen conservatives brand President Obama a socialist or a foreigner, his aides laugh it off. When critics disparage him as arrogant or aloof, they
roll their eyes. But if liberals dare compare Obama to his predecessor in the Oval Office, the gloves come off.
“I hear these people saying he’s like
George Bush,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the Hill newspaper last week. “Those people ought to be drug- tested. I mean, it’s crazy.” Gibbs went on to deride such critics as the “professional left,” who will be content only “when we have Ca- nadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.” Even though Gibbs later semi-apologized,
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myths about the midterm elections. B3
back
It’s Obama’s White House, but it’s still Bush’s world
saying he had spoken “inartfully,” it’s not hard to see why the comparison stings. As the midterm elections approach, Democrats have made George W. Bush a focus of their fall campaign. Speaking at a Texas fundrais- er Monday, Obama asked: “The policies that crashed the economy, that undercut the middle class, that mortgaged our future — do we really want to go back to that, or do we keep moving our country forward?” Their message is clear: Republicans still embody the Bush agenda, and only with a Demo- cratic White House and Congress will the nation be able to truly break from the past. The president is correct in part. Just look
at the health-care overhaul, Wall Street re- form and the new emphasis on diplomacy in American foreign policy to see the differ- ence that one election can make. Yet the
bush continued on B5 MR. BINGO
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