It\'s called "The Right Man" and is written by David Frum, a guy who wrote speeches for him for the first two years of his Presidency, giving him an insider\'s view of what was going on.
GEORGE W. BUSH is a very unusual person: a good man who is not a weak man. He has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. But outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity.
Despite these virtues, on September 10, 2001, George Bush was not on his way to a very successful presidency.
First, he was unlucky in his timing: He arrived in office to a recession, a stock market slump, and a wave of corporate scandals. Since the mid-1990s, America\'s political center of gravity had been shifting leftward. Polls showed rising confidence in government and dwindling support for the death penalty, and the election returns confirmed the polls. The corporate scandals of 2001 and 2002 amplified the trend toward activist government and away from free-market solutions. Had 9/11 not occurred, Bush would probably have had to choose between compromising with an ascendant liberalism like Richard Nixon or fighting desperate veto battles against it like Gerald Ford--neither of them a strategy for a presidency of conservative achievement.
Second, Bush was unsuccessful in his political strategy. He had sought to build a new political coalition to replace the fading Nixon-Reagan "silent majority" of white, married, middle-class voters. He had hoped to appeal to minorities and women with his "compassionate" appeals on education and immigration reform and to affluent professionals with his proposals for Social Security reform. That strategy earned him 538,000 fewer votes than his opponent in November 2000 and crippled his presidency from the start. The fight to enact his first big initiative, his tax cut, depleted the strength of his weak administration. As a result, from May 2001 onward, his domestic policy consisted of a series of increasingly desperate concessions to his opponents (on education, on spending) and to small interest groups within his own ranks (on steel, on farm subsidies). These concessions won him the occasional cosmetic victory: Steel protection, for example, bought him the authority to try to negotiate new trade deals. But the concessions gained him little with the general electorate and alienated him from his own supporters. He was in danger of becoming his father: a candidate elected by the dwindling conservative coalition, who generated less and less enthusiasm within that coalition.
Third, Bush\'s political vision was unclear. He was a politician of conservative instincts rather than conservative principles. He knew in a general way what he believed and what he did not. But on any specific issue, nobody could ever be sure where the line was beyond which he could not be pushed. This pragmatic vagueness tempted members of Congress to test him--by spending more, mucking up his education bill, or bloating up his farm bill. When Bush drew a line in the sand, he could not be budged--as Tom Daschle discovered when he suggested in January 2002 canceling Bush\'s tax cut. Bush, however, seldom drew those lines: Congress could send him legislation he believed to be flagrantly unconstitutional, like the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, and he would shrug and sign it and leave it to the courts to sort out.
Above all, Bush lacked a big organizing idea. A veteran of the first Bush White House has commented astutely that the Democrats are a party with a lot of little ideas, the Republicans the party with a few big ideas. Ronald Reagan: "Government is the problem." Richard Nixon: "Law and order." Dwight Eisenhower: "Peace and prosperity." But with every passing week in the first half of 2001, it got harder and harder to sum up who George Bush was. "Compassionate conservatism" turned out in practice not to be a big idea at all, but a whole agglomeration of little ideas--government funding for religious organizations, school testing, a higher minimum wage, tax credits for young children--wrapped together to look like a big idea. I think it was the randomness and unrelatedness of George Bush\'s policies, much more than his relative newness on the national political scene, that explains why so many Americans felt in September 2001 that they did not know this new president of theirs.
Well, they know him now.
George Bush, the uncertain peacetime president, has been nothing short of superb as a wartime leader.
His success can be summed up in three words: moderation, persistence, and boldness.
MODERATION. On September 11, the country was ready to hate, smash, and kill. Those are powerful emotions, easily exploited. Bush set himself instead to quiet and calm them. With his insistence upon tolerance for Arab and Muslim Americans, his program of swift and massive aid for the oppressed people of Afghanistan, and his generous reconstruction program for New York, he waged war in a way in which the whole country could take pride.
You will sometimes hear it said that Bush abridged civil liberties or failed to pay due respect to the opinions of America\'s allies. Neither charge can be sustained.
Consider Bush\'s record on civil liberties. The list of all the things he decided not to propose--no national ID card, no central registry for foreign students, no military tribunal for Zacarias Moussaoui--suggests that the question about Bush ought not to be "Has he gone too far?" but "Has he gone anything like far enough?"
As for the charge of disrespect for allies, who really is disrespecting whom? The Bush administration laboriously consulted with America\'s friends and treaty partners--who returned the favor in many cases with scandalous indifference and ill will. What is one to say, for example, about Gerhard Schroeder\'s anti-American re-election campaign in Germany. Or Saudi Arabia\'s sullen noncooperation against al-Qaida and Iraq? Or Mexico\'s abrogation of the Rio defense pact in the middle of the war on terror? Well, Bush said nothing at all for the record except endlessly to praise allies and friends whose leaders insulted him to their local press. And in the end, those allies--even the French, even the duplicitous Saudis--fell into line behind Bush\'s leadership.
PERSISTENCE. American troops had been in Afghanistan for less than five months when Senator Robert Byrd complained that "no end was in sight" to the war. When Bush insisted that the war did not end with the fall of the Taliban, Democrats accused him of plotting to win re-election with "a state of war until zero four." The war on terror, by its very nature, yielded few spectacular victories. For the most part it looked like a combination of police work and counterinsurgency in remote corners of the earth: Mindanao, Yemen, Kurdistan. Yet Bush kept at it. As he promised in his September 20 speech to Congress, he did not relent--and neither did he succumb to the temptation to lunge into rash adventures in pursuit of a triumph for the cameras. His strategy in Iraq and Iran was judicious, deliberate, unhasty--and certain. He made the big decisions on the war in the first 48 hours after September 11, and he adhered to those decisions to the end.
BOLDNESS. A president\'s natural inclination is to take the middle way. Bush certainly shared that bias toward caution. But at every important juncture of the war on terror, he nonetheless opted for the high-risk option: sending a small force to Afghanistan rapidly rather than waiting to build up a big one, continuing the war as a war after the fall of the Taliban, turning his back on the State Department\'s advice about the calamity that must befall the United States if it fought Osama bin Laden without first placating Yasser Arafat, and on and on.
At West Point in June 2002, Bush unveiled the most ambitious rethink of American strategic doctrine since the beginning of the Cold War. In the past, the United States had always let the other guy throw the first punch: the Confederacy at Fort Sumter, the kaiser with his subs, the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. No more. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize," Bush said, "we will have waited too long." From now on, there would be no more free punches for America\'s enemies. It was a bold policy--and it rested on a bold new moral confidence. "We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name." How could Bush be so sure what was evil and what was not? For him, it was not a difficult question. "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place."
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