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George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the forty-third and current President of the United States of America, first inaugurated on January 20, 2001. He previously served as the forty-sixth Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 and is the eldest son of former United States President George Herbert Walker Bush. After graduating from college, Bush worked in his family's oil businesses before making an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before returning to politics in a campaign for Governor of Texas. He defeated Ann Richards and was elected Governor of Texas in 1994. Bush won the presidency in 2000 as the Republican candidate in a close and controversial contest, in which he lost the nationwide popular vote, but won the electoral vote. As president, Bush signed into law a US$1.35 trillion tax cut program in 2001, and in 2002 the No Child Left Behind Act. In October 2001, after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Bush announced a global War on Terrorism and ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, destroy Al-Qaeda, and to capture Osama bin Laden. In March 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and that the war was necessary for the protection of the United States. Running in the midst of the Iraq War, Bush was re-elected on November 2, 2004; his presidential campaign against Senator John Kerry was successful despite controversy over Bush's prosecution of the Iraq War and domestic issues. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. He has the distinction of having some of the highest and lowest approval ratings of any president in history during his term. His domestic approval has ranged from 90 percent (the highest ever recorded by The Gallup Organization) immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks to a low of 24 percent, with a disapproval rating of 65 percent, the highest level of disfavor for any sitting presidents since Richard Nixon and Harry Truman. Internationally, Bush tops the list of the most unpopular politicians, with disapproval of 87% in France and Germany, and 88% in Spain.
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