Many on the right have concluded that Bush lost the GOP advantage on spending by not doing more to restrain it, and that he lost the party’s foreign policy advantage with his misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush supporters believe the advantage can be regained by disputing the critiques and pointing out where Bush was successful, and that’s what they’re doing this week. The Mead camp thinks this is a fool’s errand, because the Bush brand is still too badly damaged to gain a hearing from most Americans.

“Bush may be impressed by the devotion that so many partisans still show to his failed tenure, but no one else is, and it undermines the credibility of everything that Bush’s loyalists have to say,” wrote Daniel Larison, a senior editor at The American Conservative, a conservative magazine founded in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq War. “The fact that these loyalists refuse to take friendly and constructive criticism from someone who is mostly sympathetic to Bush just makes Mead’s point for him.”

In other words, squabbling over how much blame Bush should get for what went wrong during his presidency is a wasted exercise, the Mead camp argues, at a time when the GOP needs to move quickly to make up lost ground.