Coincidentally, I posted this on another thread recently. The short-term Bush legacy has been sunk by the press’ war of attrition.
“Consciously or not, the media has a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” strategy. They’ll print all the suspicion and innuendo they can get their hands on, and eventually the public will assume that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Take Bush. In the beginning, people knew he was no genius, but they liked him. In the end, people don’t necessarily hate him, but they think he’s at worst corrupt and at best completely incompetent. Why? The media won through attrition. Negative story after negative story sunk Bush.
No one seemed to care about the eleventh-hour cocaine story. The national guard hub-bub barely made a dent. I remember back in 2001 when stories criticizing Bush for reading children’s stories while the towers burned or Cheney’s shadow government made me laugh.
Then there was Iraq, and unlike the rest of what I’ve recapped, that was a real story. After the fall of Saddam and prior to the Surge, the media had a free-for-all. Troubles in Iraq lent credence to each and every criticism of Bush. Under the weight of yellow-cake, Scooter Libby (perhaps the thinnest presidential scandal in history, in my opinion), Harriet Meyers, Dubai, Katrina, Alberto Gonzales, et al., who could help but believe that Bush was a disaster.
History, I think, will confirm that Bush was no genius, but a good guy. Even if Iraq ends disastrously, it won’t be near as bad as Vietnam. Even if the media holds onto Scooter Libby and the rest of the “scandals” as firmly as it does Watergate, it won’t be near as bad as Nixon.
In the meantime, the name Bush will be tarnished with far too many people.”
For whatever reason, the Bush administration early on chose never to fight back. They chose never to go to the people and over the heads of the MSM. They chose chose to effectively respond to all the smears of the left, but instead chose to let them get away with sliming him.
Therefore, the left, and the MSMs (same thing), strategy to throw everything possible against Bush worked, in large measure because Bush decided not to respond. And it is largely for this reason that Bush unnecessarily has rotten poll numbers and is viewed somewhat toxicly by the public at large. They partisan left threw and threw and the Bush administration stood there and let it stick.
Of course the left is trying the same thing with Palin, and why not? It worked so effectively against Bush.
I don't know if Bush just felt that making a case to the American public was not fitting or that responding to the merciless onslaught of relentless attacks by the left was giving in to partisanship, but the fact is, Bush allowed them to slime him with relative impunity and thus is where he is today as a result of that decision. Not only did it hurt him, it also hurt the Party brand as well, and it was almost completely unnecessary and in large measure avoidable.