Comeback

ONE GEORGE W. BUSH: What Went Wrong? In January 2003, I published one of the very first memoirs of the Bush administration,The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Over the years since, the Bush administration has been hammered by difficulties and disappointments. And I have often found myself fighting against the administration I once served: against the prescription drug plan, against the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court, against amnesty for illegal aliens. During those fights, it was usually only a matter of time before I was sarcastically asked, "Sois George Bush still 'the right man'?" On the credit side: George Bush led the U.S. economy through its longest-ever expansion. He correctly identified the tyranny and misgovernment of the Middle East as the crucial cause of Islamic terrorism. He enhanced the security of the whole world by removing Saddam Hussein from control of the second most important Arab oil state. Bush showed courage on stem cells, and (Miers aside) he nominated excellent conservative judges. On the debit side: So many mistakes! And such stubborn refusal to correct them when there was still time! So many lives needlessly sacrificed, so much money wasted, so many friends alienated, so many enemies strengthened. No American president since Harry Truman has been so unpopular so long as George W. Bush. Bush's Republicans suffered one fearful defeat in 2006 and seem poised to suffer another in 2008. A generation of young Americans has been lost to our party. What went wrong? Many will want to load the blame for all the disappointments of the Bush presidency on the president himself. He surely deserves much of the blame. Why did he appoint such consistently mediocre people to such important jobs? Where was he in the summer of 2003, as Iraq began to go wrong? Why did he keep saying one thing and then doing the opposite on issues from Middle Eastern democracy to the North Korean nuclear bomb? Why did he make so little effort to persuade the American public? Why defy the nation and the party and adopt immigration amnesty as a supreme priority? Why did he spend so lavishlywhile improving government so little? I warned in 2003 of George Bush's stubbornness, his hastiness, and his inattention to detail. I believed then that his sheer determination to prevail in the war on terror would elevate him above such limitations. In that belief I was mistaken. Bush's eagerness for bold action was again and again frustrated by his disinclination to acknowledge unwelcome realities. He persuaded himself that the regimes most responsible for the growth of radicalismSaudi Arabia and Pakistancould nonetheless be relied upon as allies. He publicly declared that he would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, without any strategy to make his word good. In his eagerness to avoid condemning all Muslims as terrorists, he deceived himself about the prevalence of extremism among Muslims worldwide. George W. Bush had the right instincts, but the wrong methods. He identified the right path, but stumbled when he tried to walk it. Yet we conservatives and Republicans must face some truths about ourselves as well. In important ways, Bush saw more clearly than we. He recognized that the conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s had exhausted itself. After the triumph of 1994, we lost the battle over the government shutdown in 1995. Running as a Reagan conservative, Bob Dole lost the presidential election of 1996. In the court of public opinion, we lost the impeachment fight. We lost the congressional elections of 1998the first time since 1822 that a nonpresidential party had failed to gain seats in the sixth year of a presidential term. Bush had won the biggest Republican victory of that otherwise frusFrum, David is the author of 'Comeback', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385515337 and ISBN 0385515332.