George W. Bush

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43rd President of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 20, 2001

Vice President(s): Richard Bruce Cheney
Preceded by: William Jefferson Clinton
Succeeded by: Incumbent
Born: July 6, 1946 (age 60) New Haven, CT
Political party: Republican
Spouse: Laura Bush
Religion: United Methodist
Signature

George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current President of the United States, inaugurated on January 20, 2001 and re-elected in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

The Bush family has a significant history in the Republican Party and U.S. politics. Bush is the eldest son of the 41st U.S. President, George H. W. Bush, grandson to Prescott Bush, the former U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and older brother to Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida. George W. Bush became the 46th Governor of Texas in January 1995, resigning in December 2000, after being elected president.

Bush was first elected in 2000, becoming the fourth president in U.S. history to be elected without a plurality of the popular vote after the 1824, 1876 and 1888 elections. The 2000 election was one of the most controversial of presidential elections, not being decided until after a month of ballot recounts and court challenges in Florida ended with the United States Supreme Court reversing a Florida Supreme Court ruling and stopping the recounting of ballots.[1] Florida then certified Bush the winner in that State by a margin of 537 votes out of 6 million cast, thus giving him one Electoral College vote more than the 270 necessary for election.[2] Running as a self-described war president in the midst of the Iraq war,[3] Bush won re-election in 2004[4] after an intense and heated general election campaign against Senator John Kerry in which President Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror and the Iraq war became central issues.[citation needed]

Eight months into Bush's presidency in 2001, nineteen hijackers sponsored by al Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. President Bush responded by declaring a global War on Terrorism, which would become one of the central issues of his presidency. In early October 2001 he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and attempt to destroy al-Qaeda.[5] In March 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in violation of UN Resolution 1441 regarding weapons of mass destruction and had to be disarmed by force in order (1) to adequately protect the United States from what he asserted was "a continuing threat from Iraq", and (2) to take the "necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."[6] Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime, Bush stated his policy of attempting to establish democracy in the Middle East, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq.[7]

President Bush's declaration and prosecution of the War on Terror as he defined it would become the most enduringly controversial aspect of his presidency, including issues surrounding the Iraq War, the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandals, and related domestic controversies such as NSA warrantless surveillance activities and the Plame affair. After his re-election in 2004 in particular, Bush received increasingly heated condemnation, even from former allies, on those issues as well as other domestic issues such as his first ever use of the veto power to veto federal funding of stem cell research, and the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. According to polls of job approval rating, his popularity reached record heights after the September 11, 2001 attacks, but later drastically declined, due to his perceived poor handling of the Iraq War.[8] It was one of the major reasons for what Bush called the "thumpin'"[9][10] of the Republican Party in November 2006 mid-term elections.[11]

Contents

* 1 Early Life
* 2 Elected positions
o 2.1 Governor of Texas
o 2.2 2000 Presidential candidacy
+ 2.2.1 Primary
+ 2.2.2 General election
+ 2.2.3 Cabinet appointments
o 2.3 2004 Presidential candidacy
+ 2.3.1 Inauguration
+ 2.3.2 Cabinet
* 3 Presidency
o 3.1 Domestic policy