AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 — In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.
A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.
Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.
In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.
He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.
“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”
In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him.
He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.
Here is a top strategist, who was once a Texas Democrat, that switched political parties and his allegiances to the Bush administration. He worked for six years in the Bush White House, and was a member of the Bush team that successfully tarred Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper on the Iraq war during the 2004 presidential campaign. What is so amazing here in this NY Times story is how Dowd has become so disillusioned by the hard-lined, neoconservative governing approach that this administration has forced on both the Democrats, and practically half the country. According to the NY Times:
Mr. Dowd said he decided to become a Republican in 1999 and joined Mr. Bush after watching him work closely with Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, who was a political client of Mr. Dowd and a mentor to Mr. Bush.
“It’s almost like you fall in love,” he said. “I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy’s personality — he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.”
[....}
[Dowd] said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but “missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice.”
He was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Several associates said Mr. Dowd chafed under Mr. Rove’s leadership. Mr. Dowd said he had not spoken to Mr. Rove in months but would not discuss their relationship in detail.
Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.
“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”
He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.
He describes as further cause for doubt two events in the summer of 2005: the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the president’s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.
“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,” he said. “That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought.”
He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.
What is important to understand about this Dowd story is that we have a Bush White House that not only governs from the hard right, but also equates compromise and bipartisanship with weakness. The NY Times story shows so many examples of this administration's refusal for compromise--from refusing to meet with war protester Cindy Sheehan, to defending their positions regarding secret prisons, torture, illegal wiretappings, domestic spying, the attorney purge, and even the administration's latest refusal to accept any withdrawal timetables from the war funding bill. What we have here is a hard-lined neoconservative administration that has circled its wagons and will both lie to the American people and maliciously attack anyone who does not conform to their hard-lined agenda. It is going to be interesting to see how this Bush administration will react to this Dowd story, and the mainstream media's reflections on this story.
Here is a second story here to chew on. I found this McClatchy story, titled Bush losing key adviser on Iraq:
WASHINGTON - President Bush is losing his top day-to-day adviser on Iraq, the White House confirmed Monday.
Meghan L. O'Sullivan, who has played a key behind-the-scenes role in implementing Bush's controversial Iraq policies over the past four years, will leave later this spring.
Her departure, which follows that of her deputy, could leave the White House with a vacuum of long-term experience on Iraq policy, and it comes as Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress prepare for a showdown over withdrawing U.S. troops.
O'Sullivan, 37, known for her 100-hour work weeks and steady optimism over the eventual outcome in Iraq, said in an interview that with the completion of months-long reviews of policy in Iraq and Afghanistan - which she also oversees - she felt it was the right time for a change.
"There's never a good time to leave this kind of job. ... But (I decided) this would be as good a time as any," she said, adding that she was happy with the outcome of both reviews.
O'Sullivan, who says she's uncertain of her next job, helped craft the strategy that Bush announced in January, including an increase of 28,000 U.S. troops to help secure Baghdad.
[....]
Stanford University professor Larry Diamond, who worked in Baghdad with O'Sullivan during Bremer's tenure, called her an amazingly quick study of Iraqi politics.
She "came in with very little knowledge of Iraq when the war began," Diamond said, but by the time she left some Iraqis were calling her "the Gertrude Bell of the American mission" - a reference to the British civil administrator who helped create Iraq in the early 1920s.
Still, Diamond said, O'Sullivan's time at the White House has been "during a period where our policy has failed, and our situation in Iraq has, at best, stagnated and I think, by many objective assessments deteriorated disastrously. You can hardly call her tenure a success."
O'Sullivan isn't one of the neoconservatives who advocated the U.S. invasion. In fact, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld briefly removed her and others from an advance Pentagon team in March 2003. Yet O'Sullivan never wavered in public or private from optimism that the U.S. effort in Iraq would succeed.
The big question I have to ask here is why is Meghan L. O'Sullivan leaving her position as the top adviser to President Bush on Iraq, even at this point where President Bush is in a major fight with the Democratic Congress over an emergency war funding bill that includes a withdrawal timetable. Has O'Sullivan become disillusioned with that hard-lined position this administration has taken on the war in Iraq--even at the point of going against the opinion of the American people, as measured by the public opinion polls? According to McClatchy, O'Sullivan crafted the Bush troop surge. She is the point lady on the Bush administration's side of this entire debate. And now she is leaving the Bush team.
It is not just O'Sullivan here. I found this third, small story over at TPM Muckraker reporting even more Bush White House staff changes:
White House political director Sara Taylor is out the door at the White House, according to Washington Wire. Taylor came up a number of times yesterday during the Kyle Sampson hearing as having worked closely with Sampson (along with another Karl Rove aide Scott Jennings) to install Rove's former aide Tim Griffin as the U.S. Attorney in eastern Arkansas.
"Barry Jackson, a longtime aide to Karl Rove, also is thought to be leaving soon.... All the departures appear to be more-or-less routine turnover," reports the Washington Wire.
And let's not also forget the resignations that resulted from the attorney purge over at the Department of Justice--Kyle Sampson, and Monica Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence.
Something is going on within the Bush administration regarding staffing problems. For about six years, the administration staff has been a well-oiled machine--a political one-party machine that has been using the tools of the federal government to assert this one-party political ideology. But ever since the Democrats have taken control of Congress, and have been able to assert some type of checks against this Bush White House, this well-oiled machine has started to sputter. Dowd and O'Sullivan appear to be rank-and-file Republicans, and not the neoconservatives. I wonder if both Taylor and Jackson are also rank-and-file Republicans as well. If they are, then what we could be seeing now is the beginnings of an exodus of GOP staffers who may either be disgusted with the neocon agenda within the Bush White House, or may finally realize the writing is on the wall for this administration. If that is the case, then we may be seeing even more lower-level Bush staffers leaving the White House.
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