The George W. Bush Presidential Reputation Salvation Project

Consider Joe Scarborough -- hardly a friend to the left:

The biggest knock on Bush’s brain is his lack of intellectual curiosity. Former administration officials still close to the White House will tell you Mr. Bush detests dissent, embraces a narrow world view and is intellectually incurious.

Worse for this White House is the fact that George W. Bush has daily smackdowns with the English language and the English language usually wins.

His gaffes are funnier than most SNL skits. But more disturbing are his rambling, disjointed press conferences like the one he held earlier this week.

Friends and foes alike agree that George W. Bush is one political figure who gets worse with age. Look back at his performance as Texas governor and you will see a funny, self-assured public figure who inspires confidence. But these days, the mere opening of Mr. Bush’s mouth makes many GOP loyalists shake in their tasseled loafers.

So does it matter in the end whether our president is articulate and intelligent?

You bet your life, it does.

Sensing this shift in the wind, I'm sure, two interesting pieces have surfaced recently that are desperately trying to claw back some ground. The first is from good ol' Norman Podhoretz, who basically is trying to separate 'the Bush doctrine' from Bush itself, in the hopes it will live without him. His conclusion:

So far as the implementation of this new strategy goes, it is still early days—roughly comparable to 1952 in the history of the Truman Doctrine. As with the Truman Doctrine then, the Bush Doctrine has thus far acted only in the first few scenes of the first act of a five-act play. Like the Truman Doctrine, too, its performance has received very bad reviews. Yet we now know that the Truman Doctrine, despite being attacked by its Republican opponents as the “College of Cowardly Containment,” was adopted by them when they took power behind Dwight D. Eisenhower. We also know now that, after many ups and downs and following a period of retreat in the 1970’s, the policy of containment was updated and reinvigorated in the 1980’s by Ronald Reagan (albeit without admitting that this was what he was doing). And we now know as well that it was by thus building on the sound foundation laid by the Truman Doctrine that Reagan delivered on its original promise.

It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

The appeal of this, for those who think there's something here, is evident -- a sense of joint commitment from the major parties, that transcends basic divisions in favor of hard graft down the road to solve the seemingly (and in my view ultimately) insoluble. But the larger point is that he's trying to cut Bush himself out of all this in the hopes that the basic points will be agreed upon, that the 'doctrine' is bigger than the man. Unsurprisingly, the only people who have said anything about this piece on the positive front are current Bush supporters -- and the fact that they have to claim this as something for inspiration indicates that they're already prepared to jettison their former darling. They kinda had to with 2008 looming, but the grind until that point will make them even more desperate (the end result, barring some surprising change, is going to be a GOP candidate that will specifically have to reject or attack Bush while Bush is still in office -- a recipe for disaster but one that will yet be the only perceived way to win).

With that as the high-end attempt to anchor something for Bush's reputation, consider the middlebrow -- namely the remarkable Newsweek story by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. Essentially an extended apologia for Bush (of course), it's the result of the uphill battle Gerson knows he is facing, even as he tries to lay out the justifications for a doctrine like Podhoretz. So you get stuff like this:

The war in Iraq, without doubt, complicates our approach to Iran. It has stretched the Army and lowered our reservoir of credibility on WMD intelligence. But Iran's destabilizing nuclear ambitions are not a guarded secret; they are an announced strategy. If the lesson drawn from Iraq is that the world is too unknowable and complicated for America to act in its interests, we will pay a terrible price down the road.

As these events unfold, our country will need a better way of doing business, a new compact between citizens and their government. Americans have every right to expect competence and honesty about risks and mistakes and failures. Yet Americans, in turn, must understand that in a war where deception is the weapon and goal of the enemy, every mistake is not a lie; every failure is not a conspiracy. And the worst failure would be a timid foreign policy that allows terrible threats to emerge.

There are still many steps of diplomacy, engagement and sanctions between today and a decision about military conflict with Iran—and there may yet be a peaceful solution. But in this diplomatic dance, America should not mirror the infinite patience of Europe. There must be someone in the world capable of drawing a line—someone who says, "This much and no further." At some point, those who decide on aggression must pay a price, or aggression will be universal. If American "cowboy diplomacy" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

Again, the reaction to this piece and its sentiments have been partisan. But not all -- consider Bill Quick/Dailypundit, who certainly is hardly lockstep to begin with. And here's what you see in response to that last paragraph alone:

Well, yes. But what, exactly, is the "cowboy diplomacy" on display? GWB spent an endless amount of time trying to convince France, Russia, China, and the UN to come on board in the battle against the Hussein regime in Iraq - and failed utterly. In that long process, he ended up inadvertently giving Hussein a chance to hide his WMD, the single most important strategem of that conflict, because it destroyed the primary reason Bush himself had given for that war - and made all following justifications suspect on their face. Two alternatives present themselves: First, a bit of honesty would have helped: WMD were a factor, but American power would remain a distant chimera to the tyrants of the middle east without first, a demonstration of it, and, second, the implantation of it in a geo-strategic manner. If Bush had said, "WMDs are a problem, but only one of them. We need to destroy Saddam in order to remove the threat of his WMDs, establish democracy in his nation as a counterweight to Islamofascism (he used that term for the first time only last week), and place American warfighting power where it can directly influence and affect the major enemy in Iran," then the disappearance of the WMDs would not have been as disabling as it has turned out to be. Second, we could simply have moved faster, and wasted less time in a futile chase for European and UN approval.

Quick concludes:

If you want Americans to sacrifice "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" to destroy a "civilizational enemy," then you have to name that enemy, describe its places of power, and be honest about how far you will go - and may have to go - to achieve victory. The pabulum about diplomacy and democracy may seem politically expedient in the short run, but in the long run it has sapped the will of Americans to fight the necessary - and very real - battles that must be waged in order to win the war at all.

What is most depressing about this article is how clearly Gerson seems to understand much of the problem - which only underlines how great the Bush administration's failure has been to address it.

Sentiments like these will almost grow louder and stronger as time passes, presuming current trends hold vis-a-vis Iraq in particular and as the Iranian bogeyman takes further shape as a rhetorical tool. But what is probable is that Bush is going to leave office not merely distinctly unloved but probably fiercely rejected by his own -- a stretch, perhaps, but I'm willing to call it right now. Still, time will tell.

We'll see more of this 'project' with time so this thread will be for further observations of it.