“It saddens me he doesn’t get the acclaim on the stump,” says Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spokesman. After all, Romney, Santorum, and Newt Gingrich (as a member of Bush’s Defense Policy Board) backed the decision to invade Iraq. And they all supported the budget-busting Medicare prescription-drug program as well. So why don’t they acknowledge and embrace those areas of agreement? “I don’t know if it’s repudiation as much as it is avoidance, because they don’t want to deal with Democratic attacks in the fall for having said something praiseworthy about President Bush,” says Fleischer.

Mark McKinnon, a top campaign strategist for Bush, also feels the party should be giving his former boss more “credit and respect.” What’s more, he argues that Republicans ignore Bush’s legacy “at the expense of losing important blocs that would help them win the presidency.” But independent voters become crucial only in the fall. First a candidate has to win the nomination fight, which has become a right-wing panderfest.

One reason the anti-Bush wing is ascendant is that W., determined to avoid the spotlight in his post-presidential years, has refused to fight for himself. The political culture coarsened after he departed, giving rise to the crazed birther movement and a Tea Party that fueled the Republican takeover of the House, shaking the party establishment of which Bush was a pillar. Cooperation became a dirty word.