From Obama's speech on Latin America last week:

Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples' lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region.

No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past. But the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua.

I know blaming George W. Bush for all the problems in the world is the popular thing to do these days, but Obama does himself and the country a disservice by taking such a cheap and easy route with respect to Chavez, especially suggesting that the war in Iraq was somehow an integral part of his rise.

Chavez was elected in December 1998 - two years before President Bush took office - running as a Marxist demagogue, and it was clear from the outset what kind of leader he would be. By July 1999 he had forced through a rewriting of the Venezuelan Constitution that restructured the government, vastly expanded his authority, and increased his ability to pack the court system.

I remember this period fairly well, because at the time I lived in Miami and worked with a young woman from a well to do family from Venezuela. Her parents, along with the rest of the business class in Venezuela, were petrified by Chavez and were scrambling to try and find ways of sheltering and/or protecting their assets before Chavez seized them - as he'd promised to do.

Again, all of this took place during the Clinton administration in the year and a half preceding George W. Bush's election, and a full four years before the Iraq campaign began. Though Obama would like to argue Chavez is somehow a monster of George Bush's making, the truth is that he was a bad actor from the beginning, and would have remained so regardless of who was occupying the White House.