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Essay on George W. Bush

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George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is the son of the 41st President George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush. Born on July 6, 1946, Bush was raised in Houston, Texas and was the oldest of four children. Bush finished his high school years at Phillips Academy, which was an all-male boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was the head cheerleader during his senior year. Bush went to college at Yale University from 1964 till his graduation in 1968 where he finished with a Bachelor’s degree in history. In the fall of 1973, Bush attended the Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA. He is the only US President to have earned an MBA. He also is the first US President to get into office with a criminal record, as he had multiple
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His campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction and educational improvement. He won re-election in 1998, becoming the first Governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms.
In June of 1999, while still Governor of Texas, Bush announced his candidacy for President of the United States. In the final showdown, it was between Bush and Vice President Al Gore in one of the closest elections ever. After a third recount, Bush received 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266 and became the 43rd President of the United States. However, he lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes. His fist initiative as President was the No Child Left Behind Act, which raised standards in schools and insisted on accountability in return for federal dollars. The most significant event during Bush’s reign came on September 11, 2001 when terrorists hijacked several planes and attacked American soil killing nearly 3,000 people. In response to the attack, Bush established the Department of Homeland Security and announced the “War on Terrorism” which still continues to this day. Bush focused his attention on Iraq, labeling them as part of an “axis of evil”. He proclaimed that they were in the possession of weapons of mass destruction and had to be stop. Eventually, they captured the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but no weapons were discovered. In 2000 and again in 2004, Bush was named the Person of the Year by Time magazine.
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