History
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1946, Bush was the first child of George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush. Bush attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
He trained and studied for the Air National Guard . He then attended Harvard receiving his MBA and went into the Oil Business. Prior to running for President, Bush was elected twice as Governor of Texas.
The 2000 Presidential Election was one for the history books on several counts and that it quite literally the truth. First, Gore won the Popular vote by about 600,00 votes, but lost the Electoral vote. This was the first time that such had happened in modern Presidential Elections. Second, the election all boiled down to one state, Florida, and the vote was so close in Florida that a recount had to be done. The final outcome was not known for weeks and even then the matter went to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the famous Bush Vs Gore case, and the Court voted along partisan lines to end the Florida recount and after final tallies were added in from Volusia and Broward counties, the official FL results gave the State’s 25 electoral votes to Bush by a mere 537 votes. All this happened after an totally insane election night. For starters, before any votes were counted, NBC commentator, the late Tim Russert, pulled out a white board with three words written on it, “Florida Flordia Flordia”. No doubt about it, Tim nailed it perfectly. The entire race for President was going to hinge on the vote in one state. Soon after the polls closed in most of FL, some of the networks called the race for Gore, based upon exit polls. However, as the night dragged on, it was clear that the FL count was so close that it was no longer safe to put FL in Gore’s column. Hence, those networks who had called the race and to recant and they now put FL in their undecided column. A few hours later, Bush had built a small, but apparently decisive lead and so most or all of the networks called the race for him and declared him to be President-Elect. However, Gore refused to concede and rightfully so. Within another hour, some late votes came in for Gore which tightened things so much that all of the networks were forced to declare FL too close to call. What a total mess! The networks had egg all over their faces. The anchors had to apologize. It was a real fiasco of the highest order. So what had gone wrong? The experts claim that the exit polls were actually correct, that Gore had won FL according to the intent of the voters. They base their thesis on the fact that a terribly confusing ballot in Palm Beach County had misled at least 1,000 voters to incorrectly cast a vote for Independent Pat Buchannan, instead of the Gore-Lieberman ticket. Adding in those 1,000 or more votes to the Gore column would have given him the state, though only by about 500 votes. However, this fact must be balanced against the early calling of the state for Gore, which might have caused a few hundred Bush voters in the heaily Republican panhandle, which is in the Central time zone, to stay home and not bother to vote. It would seem that exit polls in such an extremely tight race cannot be trusted for accuracy.
Although fictionally powerless, for eight years he held a position as one of the most powerful men alive.
Due to 9/11, Bush began a “War on Terror,” sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. He led the military in the successful capture of Saddam Hussein.
When George Bush left office he had one of the worst polls of any president. Many times he has been ranked in the bottom 5 along with James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. His presidency is often considered to be a failure. What is most amazing is that right after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Bush’s favorable rating was at about 90% in the polls. Unfortunately for him, due to the unpopularity of the Iraq War and a slowwing economy, his poll numbers did not stay high very long as they quickly took a tumble.