Bush did what he thought was right—and on the biggest issues, what was right.

As George W. Bush prepares to leaves the White House after eight misunderestimated years, National Review Online asked a group of experts in policy and politics to assess his presidency.

President Bush ignored the usual diversity mandates and added two stellar jurists to the Supreme Court (only, however, after his preposterous attempt to put Harriet Miers on the bench failed). The Pentagon began a brilliant research project to mine commercial data bases for intelligence on terrorist activity; we can only hope that after the Senate killed the project, its component parts continued simmering on some back burner waiting for a Democratic president to revitalize the research. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities added to the nation’s store of beauty and learning, sending American opera singers to serenade military bases and schools, and putting the nation’s historical documents and literary works online. Bowing to the popular will, President Bush began enforcing the immigration laws for the first time in decades, thus providing indisputable empirical backing for the claim that immigration enforcement works—employers cut back on their use of illegal aliens, and illegal flows into the country dropped. Notwithstanding our current credit crisis, American technological innovation and entrepreneurship thrived during the last decade, aided in part by a saner regulatory and tax environment.

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