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George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the forty-third and
current President of the United States of America. He previously
served as the forty-sixth Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 and is
the eldest son of former United States President George Herbert
Walker Bush. He was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2001 and
his current term is scheduled to end on January 20, 2009.
After graduating from college, Bush worked in his family's oil
businesses. In 1978, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House
of Representatives. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball
team before returning to politics in a campaign for Governor of
Texas. He defeated Ann Richards and was elected Governor of Texas in
1994. Bush was elected to the Presidency in 2000 as the Republican
candidate in a close and controversial contest, in which he lost the
nationwide popular vote, but won the electoral vote.
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"Read my lips, NO MORE BUSH!" - Lady Liberty
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As president, Bush signed into law a $1.35 trillion tax cut program
in 2001, and in 2002 the No Child Left Behind Act. In October 2001,
after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Bush announced a global War
on Terrorism and ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the
Taliban, destroy Al-Qaeda, and to capture Osama bin Laden. In March
2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in
possession of weapons of mass destruction and that the war was
necessary for the protection of the United States.
Running in the midst of the Iraq War, Bush was re-elected on
November 2, 2004; his presidential campaign against Senator John
Kerry was successful despite controversy over Bush's prosecution of
the Iraq War and domestic issues. After his re-election, Bush
received increasingly heated criticism. He has the distinction of
having some of the highest and lowest approval ratings of any
president in history during his term. His domestic approval rating
has ranged from 90 percent (the highest ever recorded by The Gallup
Organization) immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks to a
low of 24 percent, the highest level of disfavor for any sitting
president since Richard Nixon. |
