Peggy Noonan says it Tom Smith
Peggy Noonan in the WSJ Opinion Journal pretty much says it all:
The beginning of my own sense ofseparation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when thepresident declared that it is now the policy of the United States toeradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of Americanliberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was atonce so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others thebeginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence itrevealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
WhatI came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this WhiteHouse, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–asense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not allthere is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that aretrue of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, thatpersonal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge ofanything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes aloyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’tneed hacks.
One of the things I have come tothink the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, thoughdifferent in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance.They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it whatthey liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party atpeace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally,at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and cometogether on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he wouldgovern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected toReagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they likedhim. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and foundhimself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight longand consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted hisinheritance.
Bush the younger came forward,presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopesof his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later washanded a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him,lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and oftendaring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, andbroke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I donot understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicansare going to have to win back their party. They are going to have tobreak from those who have already broken from them. This will requirecourage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists usedto call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more thantime.
None of this is news to me. I am old enough (it wasn’t that long ago!) to remember the Bushies lurking, waiting the the Gipper to leave office. Everyone one of us real Reagan types, and there weren’t that many of us left in the White House in 1987, knew that a different kinda weather was blowing in. In my ever so humble view, Bush the lesser has been like Bush the elder, only worse. I’m actually probably closer to the White House than I am to the right wing of the GOP on immigration, but even in such a position I can get offended at how the White House has handled this. I would become enraged when people claimed Reagan was stupid, because it was a lie. Now I despair when they say the same thing about Bush because it seems so true. Not everybody can be a genius, not even every President. But combine that with the arrogance that wafts out of what’s left of the Bush administration, and it’s just a little hard to take. Clinton may have done his interns in the Oval Office hallway and stolen everything not nailed down when he left, but he didn’t beach the Democratic Party. If we get eight years of Hillary we will have mainly W to thank for it. So, yeah, me too. I am so done with the guy and the whole bunch of them. Jeb can go buy an orange grove or something.