IN RECENT MONTHS, Republicans have begun to discover that their leader is not the paragon they once thought he was.
Perhaps he is not a conservative at all but a deficit-mongering big-government advocate, a world-changing radical in disguise and a cultivator of global anti-Americanism. Perhaps, from Baghdad to Kabul to New Orleans, bungling is not the exception but the rule because he and his inner circle hold planning, the law, diplomacy and even reason in contempt.
Suddenly, Republicans as well as Democrats are urging the defenestration of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- the Titanic chair-shifter's way of acknowledging a fiasco in Iraq. George Will savaged President Bush for a "triumph of unrealism." Embattled Connecticut Republican Rep. Christopher Shays lurched from "stay the course" to "phased withdrawal."
Just last month, conservative talk-show host Joe Scarborough asked, "Is Bush an Idiot?" In May, the popular right-wing KABC-AM (790) talk-show host Doug McIntyre declared: "I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush.... I have been shocked repeatedly by a consistent litany of excuses, alibis, doubletalk, inaccuracies, bogus predictions and flat-out lies.... After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush, I've reached the conclusion he's either grossly incompetent or a hand-puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both."
Such reconsiderations are all to the good, and not only for the practical purpose of evacuating a sinking ship. The recantation mood is a sign of maturity.
But apologies, while worthy, are never enough. To help make right what has gone badly wrong, they also must lead to rethinking.
Because 1930s analogies are back in vogue, consider that it was incumbent upon conservatives who were dismayed by Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 to inquire into the worldview that led him to appease Adolf Hitler. Likewise, as conservatives never cease to remind those on the left, it was perfectly reasonable to tell the Soviet Union's fellow travelers to examine the fantastical credulity with which they persuaded themselves to overlook the depredations of Lenin and Stalin. To learn from our greatest misconceptions is, of course, a prime reason we study history.
So what lessons should Bush's partisans take from his decline? Where did they go wrong when they were cheering Bush, excoriating his adversaries and devoutly assuring the rest of us that he was, as former presidential speechwriter David Frum put it in an unabashed double entendre, "the right man"?
