Debushification

Yet another former Bush insider comes forward to tell all about the goings on within the secretive Bush White House.

He has been hailed as the best White House speechwriter since Kennedy's Theodore Sorensen, the muse behind President Bush's most famous phrases, the moral conscience of the West Wing. But now Michael J. Gerson is accused by a former colleague of taking credit for words he did not write.

According to Matthew Scully, who worked with him for five years, Gerson is not the bard of Bushworld but rather a "self-publicizing" glory hog guilty of "foolish vanity," "sheer pettiness" and "credit hounding." In Scully's account, Gerson did not come up with the language that made him famous. "Few lines of note were written by Mike," Scully says, "and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses -- not even 'axis of evil.' "

Scully's blistering portrait [subscription required] of one of the president's most prominent former advisers in the new issue of the Atlantic touched off an intense pushback by the White House yesterday as top Bush aides jumped to defend Gerson as the victim of a jealous associate. But the internecine feuding may signal something broader than pride of authorship. Scully's 10-page indictment represents the sort of classic Washington tell-all once rare in an administration known for discipline and loyalty.

As the article in the Washington Post notes, Mr. Scully is not the first ex-Bushie to turn on his former leader and colleagues.

As Bush heads toward the final months of a presidency mired in troubles at home and abroad, onetime insiders increasingly have turned on people or policies they had supported. Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief reelection strategist, has disavowed him. John R. Bolton, his former U.N. ambassador, has led the charge against key foreign policy decisions. Kenneth Adelman, a close friend of Vice President Cheney, has denounced what he calls the worst administration in modern times.

And he certainly won't be the last. While it's not unusual for books and stories to leak out about embarrassments and gossip in an administration while they're in office -- look at the library that came out about the Clintons by everyone from former aides to miffed Secret Service agents -- this administration has been noted for their Kremlin-style suppression of chatter and secrecy. But as the months remaining in this presidency dwindle down, the wheels are starting to wobble.

As Joshua Green reports in The Atlantic, even the much-feared Karl Rove is being turned from the boy genius who single-handedly launched the one-party rule that would last a thousand years into just another overblown hack who didn't have the ability to stop running a campaign and actually turn his sock-puppet into a genuine leader once he got him into office.

Rove has always cast himself not merely as a campaign manager but as someone with a mind for policy and for history’s deeper currents—as someone, in other words, with the wherewithal not just to exploit the political landscape but to reshape it. At the Christian Science Monitor lunch [shortly after Bush's re-election in 2004], he appeared poised to do just that. It was already clear that Social Security privatization, a longtime Rove enthusiasm, was the first thing Bush would pursue in his second term. When things are going well for Rove, he adopts a towel-snapping jocularity. He looked supremely sure of his prospects for success.

But within a year the administration was crumbling. Social Security had gone nowhere. Hurricane Katrina, the worsening war in Iraq, and the disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court shattered the illusion of stern competence that had helped reelect Bush. What surprised everybody was how suddenly it happened; for a while, many devotees of the Cult of Rove seemed not to accept that it had. As recently as last fall, serious journalists were churning out soaring encomiums to Rove and his methods with titles like One Party Country and The Way to Win. In retrospect, everyone should have been focusing less on how those methods were used to win elections and more on why they couldn’t deliver once the elections were over.

The story of why an ambitious Republican president working with a Republican Congress failed to achieve most of what he set out to do finds Rove at center stage. A big paradox of Bush’s presidency is that Rove, who had maybe the best purely political mind in a generation and almost limitless opportunities to apply it from the very outset, managed to steer the administration toward disaster.

As Hurricane Katrina proved, it only takes a couple of hours to inflict damage that takes much longer to clean up. So it is true with the damage inflicted by this administration on the Constitution, the infrastructure, the military, and our standing in the world among allies who have lost whatever trust we have earned with them -- tenuous at best after Vietnam and the Cold War -- and emboldened our enemies who see us as hypocrites and paper tigers.

The process of cleaning up after the Bush administration and repairing the damage will take more than just electing someone else as president. (Joe Conason warns that electing another Republican could exacerbate the problems.) These stories that lift the corner of the curtain covering the Bush administration give us a preview of what is to come in the years ahead...and how much work we will have to do to get our country and our good name back.