Bush Legacy Tour

President Bush was on Fox News Sunday this weekend, talking about his legacy – and his legacy's impact on the upcoming election:

More from the interview:

WALLACE : Mr. President, as your time in office winds down, you're getting some harsh assessments, even from some loyal Republicans. I'd like to read you one if I might.

Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote, "George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues."

How do you respond?

BUSH: I respectfully disagree with my friend Peggy Noonan.

History will be the judge of an administration and I — when you make tough decisions like I have had to make, you obviously ruffle some feathers and I can understand why people would disagree with some of the decisions I made.

On the other hand, when you really think about it, we haven't had an attack on America. We have inherited a recession and had 52 months of uninterrupted job growth which is a record.

Wages up, productivity up. Look, I feel good about my record. But look, it's impossible for short term historians to objectively analyze it. I know that.

WALLACE: Let me ...

BUSH: I saw in CPAC the other day something interesting. That I read three books on Washington in the last couple years and they're still analyzing the first guy. What do I have to worry about?

It's going to take a long time to figure it out and so this is all — I could give you a whole, I could give you reams of books about criticisms of my administration. I understand this. It comes with the territory.

WALLACE: Let me ask you about one specific area, following up.

And the idea is that the principles you advanced were in at least some cases undermined by the way they were executed.

Cory Shockey (ph), who was a professor at West Point and served on your National Security Council, wrote this. "I fear that the biggest foreign policy legacy of the Bush administration will be that it delegitimized its own strategy. Whether you're talking about the democratization agenda, or the idea of preventive war and regime change. He says that, in other words, after Iraq, that the country would not permit another preventive war even if we should have one.

BUSH: Well, I don't know whether this person — sorry, I don't know who that person is. She may have worked for me but I don't think she ever worked in the Oval Office.

Secondly, I don't know where she was on the Iraq decision to remove Saddam Hussein but I strongly believe it's the right decision. It was the right decision then and it's the right decision today to have removed Saddam Hussein.

And secondly I believe the Iraq democracy is going to take hold and — it's very hard to write the future history of America before the current history hasn't been fully written.