The GOP needs to talk about Bush

I don’t agree with the professional Bush-bashers and am perfectly willing to give the Bush administration its due. Not every decision the President made was bad, and the circumstances of his administration were difficult and harsh. President Bush was, is, a decent and honorable man who did his level best in the world’s most difficult job. The Democrats who ran against him might have done considerably worse. Some of the things that went wrong were not his fault and more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood. Many of the failings of those years were due more to execution than to vision and to tone more than substance. It was also true, and brutally true at times, that the press corps did everything it could to shine the brightest possible spotlight on every pimple on the face of the Bush administration. There was no wart, no scar, no stretch mark on the Bush administration that didn’t get its full fifteen minutes of fame.

But make every allowance you can, discount the press bias and polish up the accomplishments as much as you like, and the conclusion still cannot be evaded: George W. Bush’s presidency was not a success and its result was to diminish the credibility of the ideas he professed and to damage the brand of the party whose standard he bore.

A lot of official Republican discourse tries to skate past the failures of the Bush years, but this won’t do. It’s a bit like a hostess trying to keep up the bright cocktail party chatter around an eight hundred pound tuna fish rotting in the living room. It isn’t convincing, and the effort does not inspire trust in her judgment.