Ex-Aide Details a Loss of Faith in the President

Matthew Dowd, the Democrat who had so much faith in President Bush's message that he changed parties to join Mr Bush's brain trust and worked for six years to help him get elected and keep him there - eventually being made Bush's chief campaign strategist - has spoken out saying that his faith in the President was "misplaced".

He has called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in 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.”

Dowd is the first member of 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.

Dowd was one of the people who helped Bush get re-elected in 2004, in part by labelling John Kerry as "a flip-flopper", although he has become so disillusioned with Bush's handling of the Iraq crisis that he has since written - although not submitted - an op-ed piece entitled "Kerry was right", in which he argues that Kerry's demand that the US should withdraw from Iraq was actually the right call.

This is actually indicative of the way many of Bush's past supporters are starting to fall away, what makes this one especially interesting is that Dowd actually worked to get Bush elected and was a member of the inner circle.

You'll remember that Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who both sat on the Defence Policy Board, turned on Bush in November last year charging his administration with incompetence.

Asked if he would still have pushed for war knowing what he knows now, Mr Perle, a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, said: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'."

"I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent," Mr Adelman said.

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

And now we have yet another true believer speaking out, saying that he was for many years "in denial" about the kind of leader Bush actually was. He also states that it was an accumulation of very many factors that eventually convinced him that Bush was a divider rather than a uniter has he had previously claimed. He cites the handling of Katrina, the refusal to fire Rumsfeld after the discovery of torture at Abu Ghraib, and Bush's attempts to have John Bolton confirmed as US Ambassador to United Nations as all incidents which led him to realise that Bush was not interested in seeking consensus with the Democrats.

He said he came to believe Mr. Bush’s views were hardening, with the reinforcement of his inner circle. But, he said, the person “who is ultimately responsible is the president.” And he gradually ventured out with criticism, going so far as declaring last month in a short essay in Texas Monthly magazine that Mr. Bush was losing “his gut-level bond with the American people,” and breaking more fully in this week’s interview.

“If the American public says they’re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,” Mr. Dowd said. “They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’ ”

As Bush continues on his, "I'm the decider - my way or the highway" style of leadership, I fully expect more and more of his former colleagues to break away from him. Bush now appears to be listening to small group of hard core neo-cons, the kind of people who possess the mentality that says that the US could have won the war in Vietnam if they had only held their nerve, and that they are applying this same mindset to Iraq.

What Bush perceives as leadership is actually nothing more than an extreme form of stubbornness. He seems to have forgotten that, in order to lead, it is important that you form a vision that people willingly want to follow. That has not been the case with Bush for quite a while now and it is only inevitable, when someone cannot express a vision that inspires others, that eventually even your greatest supporters start to notice the cracks in the facade and break away.

It was Thatcher's final lament, "Give me ten good men and true and I can get the job done". In the end, of course, it was Thatcher's inner circle that deserted her, repulsed by that which had once inspired them.

The longer Bush stubbornly pushes an unpopular war against the wish of the American public, the less even close associates will want to be associated with him, as is becoming clear from the Republican reaction to the Gonzales affair. Where once they would have rallied behind the Attorney General, they now have their eyes fixed on the 2008 finish line. And, with that in mind Bush is not only no longer a help, he's becoming a positive hindrance.

''Support for President Bush becomes less important the closer we get to the election,'' said Republican consultant Rich Galen. ''I'm not sure he'll be totally irrelevant, but certainly there will be more time, attention and money spent on propping up and-or defending the emerging front-runner, and then the party nominee, than the outgoing president.''

We can expect more people to distance themselves from Bush as time goes on. He thinks he's a leader, but what use is a leader if no-one is following?

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Tags: Matthew Dowd, Bush, Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, 2008