"So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?"
About this Quote
Bush’s great rhetorical trick here is to flatten history into a poker hand, then treat the presidency as table stakes rather than authorship. “The hand you’re dealt” sounds humble, almost folksy, but it quietly redirects responsibility away from choices and toward fate. Recession, dot-com bust, 9/11, financial meltdown: the list is curated to read like a natural-disaster reel, a string of events that simply happened to land on his watch.
The context matters. Bush’s presidency is inseparable from 9/11 and its aftershocks, and his legacy is permanently contested on questions of agency: What was unavoidable, what was preventable, what was self-inflicted? By bundling together an early recession with an epochal terrorist attack and a later market collapse, he implies a single governing problem: crisis management. That framing asks the audience to grade him on composure, not on judgment. It’s an appeal to the voter’s instinct to forgive the unlucky and reward the steady.
Even the stumbles in delivery (“in the -the”) reinforce the persona he cultivated: plainspoken, imperfect, relatable. The subtext is: I didn’t choose the era; I just had to play it. It’s also an argument for empathy across administrations. If politics is a card game, then criticism starts to look like heckling a player for bad luck, not interrogating the rules of the game or the bets they made.
The context matters. Bush’s presidency is inseparable from 9/11 and its aftershocks, and his legacy is permanently contested on questions of agency: What was unavoidable, what was preventable, what was self-inflicted? By bundling together an early recession with an epochal terrorist attack and a later market collapse, he implies a single governing problem: crisis management. That framing asks the audience to grade him on composure, not on judgment. It’s an appeal to the voter’s instinct to forgive the unlucky and reward the steady.
Even the stumbles in delivery (“in the -the”) reinforce the persona he cultivated: plainspoken, imperfect, relatable. The subtext is: I didn’t choose the era; I just had to play it. It’s also an argument for empathy across administrations. If politics is a card game, then criticism starts to look like heckling a player for bad luck, not interrogating the rules of the game or the bets they made.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|
More Quotes by George
Add to List
