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Opinion: “The General Welfare” and presidents past and future

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

As we have examined the values and candidates in this election, we, the members of The Times’ editorial board, have not had a lot of praise for President Bush. We disagree with him on the war in Iraq, on Guantanamo, on abortion, on the right of gays to marry, on global warming… I could go on.

That trend continues with today’s piece in our series, as we have our issues with the president in areas such as healthcare and school vouchers. Still, we do sometimes agree, and two places where we converge are aired in today’s editorial. As we note, President Bush has been an important educational advocate and leader, and he has done his best to devise and win approval for comprehensive immigration reform.

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So, while we’re not likely to find ourselves missing President Bush much after he goes home to Crawford, we appreciate that he has done much to elevate the place of education in our national dialogue. No Child Left Behind isn’t perfect — not by a longshot — but Bush’s advocacy of it helped bring Republicans into the conversation and expand the sense of a president’s responsibility in an area traditionally left to the states. Bush deserves credit, and we’re happy to give it.

On immigration, he has less to show for his work, but there, we can only hope that the next president will build on what Bush tried to do and finally create a mechanism for those who are in the country illegally to stay and become citizens. That’s a worthy goal for Bush’s successor. Unfortunately, the candidates so far aren’t doing much to inspire confidence that they’ll take up that cause.

As those of you who have been reading know, these editorials all have been framed in terms of eternal American values, but examining those values in fresh light yields some reminders. Education, for instance, now dominates much of our national political debate, but it barely existed as a public right in colonial America and through much of the 19th century. As a matter of “the general welfare,” then, it is a fairly new concept. Immigration, by contrast, was as vital to early America as it is today, testing some of our systems, yes, but also supplying the nation with new ideas and cultures and allowing to become a truly polyglot enterprise, unlike any country on earth. We only wish that more of our neighbors shared our faith in this country to absorb its migrants to adapt to them and with them.

Today’s editorial is the penultimate piece in our nine-part series, which we will conclude next week and then turn to our endorsements for president. We welcome your reactions — so far, we’re posted more than 125 entries on our discussion boards, and we’ve received several hundred letters and emails. The range of response has essentially covered the waterfront, from the much-appreciated admirer who wished he could elect an editorial page as president (who doesn’t?) to the less-impressed critic who this week wrote to say, simply: “your editorial again shows the world you are the scum of the earth.” Oh well.

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