President George Walker Bush took office in 2001 after winning a highly contested election and then leading the nation through a major terror attack, an economic recession and corporate scandals, and should be elected again, a Knox County Bush campaign supporter said.
“We were in a recession when he was sworn into office, then we have corporate scandals and the dot-com bust, and then Sept. 11,” Corey Johns, Knox County coordinator for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said. ” You look at those and then you step back and look at where we are today, we have turned the door with our economy.”
Bush began his career as an F-102 fighter pilot for the Texas Air Force Reserves after earning his Bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1968, according to his campaign biography.
He received his master’s in business administration from Harvard before entering the energy business in 1975.
More than a decade later he and a group of partners purchased the Texas Rangers not long after his father’s 1988 election.
Bush stayed with the Rangers as managing general partner until he tried his hand at politics and was elected Governor of Texas in Nov. 1994.
Bush is runnig on a platform of continuing tax cuts, furthering of the No Child Left Behind changes in national primary and secondary school testing and more homeland defense.
While in office as governor, Texas saw two of the biggest tax cuts in its history that totaled over $3 billion. Bush attempted, unsuccessfully, to privatize Texas social services.
Focusing largely on education, one of Bush’s goals was to ensure every child in Texas could read and to incite educational reform, his Web site said.
As governor, Bush’s environmental policies came under attack in Texas, but campaign officials said his environmental policy is reducing pollution in America.
“With regard to environment, he is certainly for decreasing our foreign dependence through domestic exploration,” Johns said.
Bush was the first Texas governor who was elected to four consecutive terms before announcing his candidacy for president in 1999.
Once in office as president, Bush began making educational and security reforms with the No Child Left Behind Act and PATRIOT Act, which drastically changed education as well as law enforcement in America.
Bush has also been leading the country in the war on terror, which began in 2001 as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
“To me, if you consider his presidency, no other president in modern times has faced the challenges he has,” Corey Johns, Knox County Coordinator for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said.
