In the 2000 presidential election, he won over Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore, while losing the popular vote after a narrow and contested Electoral College win, which involved a Supreme Court decision to stop a recount in Florida.

[26][27] Walt Harrington, a journalist, recalled seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman.

[58] According to The Atlantic, the race "featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record – when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for 'appointing avowed homosexual activists' to state jobs".

He campaigned on a platform that included bringing integrity and honor back to the White House, increasing the size of the military, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities.

[84] Bush and the Republican platform emphasized a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,[85] support for the USA PATRIOT Act,[86] a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage,[85][87] reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts,[85] creation of an ownership society,[85] and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls.

[121] In December 2007, the United States entered the longest post–World War II recession,[96] caused by a housing market correction, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, and other factors.

[128][129][130] In September 2008, the crisis became much more serious beginning with the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a federal bailout of American International Group for $85 billion.

[142][143] After being re-elected, Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, according to Jan Crawford, resulted in "the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years" – the bill's costs approached $7 trillion.

[154] Upon taking office in 2001, Bush stated his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks to impose mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, citing that the treaty exempted 80 percent of the world's population[155] and would have cost tens of billions of dollars per year.

Bush argued that the lack of legal status denies the protections of U.S. laws to millions of people who face dangers of poverty and exploitation, and penalizes employers despite a demand for immigrant labor.

[190] The eye of the hurricane made landfall on August 29, and New Orleans began to flood due to levee breaches; later that day, Bush declared a major disaster in Louisiana,[191] officially authorizing FEMA to start using federal funds to assist in the recovery effort.

[215] During his presidential campaign, Bush's foreign policy platform included support for stronger economic and political relationships with Latin America, especially Mexico, and a reduction of involvement in "nation-building" and other small-scale military engagements.

Bush also expressed U.S. support for the defense of Taiwan following the stand-off in April 2001 with China over the Hainan Island incident, when an EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided with a People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, leading to the detention of U.S. personnel.

"[237][238] In his January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, he asserted that an "axis of evil" consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Ba'athist Iraq was "arming to threaten the peace of the world" and "pose[d] a grave and growing danger".

[249][250] Efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden failed as he escaped a battle in December 2001 in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, which the Bush Administration later acknowledged to have resulted from a failure to commit enough U.S. ground troops.

[257] Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an "axis of evil" allied with terrorists and posing "a grave and growing danger" to U.S. interests through possession of weapons of mass destruction.

[259][260] Contentions that the Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.

In November 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei led UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, but were advised by the U.S. to depart the country four days prior to the U.S. invasion, despite their requests for more time to complete their tasks.

The initial success of U.S. operations increased his popularity, but the U.S. and allied forces faced a growing insurgency led by sectarian groups; Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was later criticized as premature.

[277] In March 2008, Bush praised the Iraqi government's "bold decision" to launch the Battle of Basra against the Mahdi Army, calling it "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq".

The new directive allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications between suspected terrorists outside the U.S. and parties within the U.S. without obtaining a warrant, which previously had been required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

[302] The new rule was enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006),[303] which allowed the U.S. government to prosecute unlawful enemy combatants by military commission rather than a standard trial.

[316] Under separate executive orders signed by Bush in 2004 and later 2007, the Treasury Department froze the assets of two Lebanese and two Syrians, accusing them of activities to "undermine the legitimate political process in Lebanon" in November 2007.

[325][326][327][328] On May 10, 2005, while President Bush was giving a speech in Freedom Square, Vladimir Arutyunian, a native Georgian who was born to a family of ethnic Armenians, threw a live Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade toward the podium.

After his re-election in 2004, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum[356][357][358] for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina,[359][360][361] and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies.

[383][384][385] Other leaders, such as Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan,[386] Yoweri Museveni of Uganda,[387] José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain,[388] and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,[389] openly criticized the president.

[401] The Bush administration's support for the unilateral declaration of independence of Albanian-majority Kosovo, while endearing him to the Albanians, troubled U.S. relations with Serbia, leading to the February 2008 torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.

[412][413] In March 2009, he delivered his first post-presidency speech in Calgary, Alberta,[414][415] appeared via video on The Colbert Report during which he praised U.S. troops for earning a "special place in American history",[416] and attended the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy.

[458] On July 30, Bush and his wife, along with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, attended and spoke at the funeral for civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

[495] Bryon Williams of The Huffington Post referred to Bush as "the most noteworthy president since FDR" and said the Patriot Act "increased authority of the executive branch at the expense of judicial opinions about when searches and seizures are reasonable" as evidence.