I agree with you on Bush...I think it was his very decency, or at any rate, his idea of how a decent man should act, that did him in.
One of the problems with having a weak or self-effacing leader is that the people who look to him for leadership are left in the lurch and unprotected. The GOP, with its huge RINO contingent (and Bush really wasn’t a RINO, despite some of his policies particularly later on as he tried to win favor from the left), was busy trying to prove to the world during the campaign that they were as much Bush-haters as everybody else, because the media had done such a fantastic job at demonizing the inoffensive Bush precisely because they knew that he was a little more conservative. I think this extended to the GOP candidates as well; they were running against Bush, and also seem to accept Obama as a foregone conclusion to such an extent that they didn’t even oppose him and spent most of their time shooting at each other.
If there had been a genuine Republican party, as you say, with genuine positions independent of Bush’s success or not in carrying them out, the weaker members might have had a rallying point and some ideological identity and way of fighting back. But the GOP didn’t offer this.
So when the left came up with a candidate who was, most importantly of all, black, and second most important, a complete unknown with an obscure past and a chameleon-like personality to whom anything could be attributed, the GOP and all its weak-sister members (such as Gates) really didn’t know what to do.
I see Gates as going to work day after day wondering if this was all a nightmare and he’d wake up if he stuck it out long enough. But instead Obama’s viciousness just unleashed even more viciousness from everybody to his empowered apparatchiks in the WH to the Dem members of Congress who held these “hearings” which were mainly meant to indict Bush for his performance, even though he was no longer in office.
I absolutely agree that Gates should have quit earlier and he should have come clean earlier, but I think he was probably somewhat afraid and, as you point out, completely unsupported by others in the party. I hope his book is only the first of many tell-alls by people who have survived their encounter with the Obama government.
I’d like to agree with you on this, but Reagan was decent, self-effacing, gracious, and yet confident about the moral, economic, and scientific foundations beneath his decisions.
In fact, the only places where he had regrets about his presidency were areas where he betrayed what he knew for what he ‘felt’ - raising taxes and immigration ‘reform’.
Bush, with the benefit of Reagan’s mistakes felt obligated to repeat them anyway.
That’s why history, as a field of study, has fallen out of favor.
At the end, leaders fit into three categories - those that learn from reading about the mistakes of others, those that need to watch others make mistakes and learn from them, and those that believe that ‘this time its different’.
In comparing Bush, Clinton, and Obama, only Clinton was willing to tailor his ideology with what he saw going on outside the window. This isn’t to say that Clinton was a moral leader, a good leader, or had the country on the right track either.
As an example, he passed welfare reform because he knew it wasn’t actually helping the people it was intended to help, and he refused to lie to blue collar workers about his ability to do anything about low skill labor jobs moving overseas. This stopped at the water’s edge however, with his ‘ignore militant Islamism and it will go away’ foreign policy.
Reagan, however, was amazing, in that he inherited 30 years of ‘Cold War Without End’ orthodoxy and said, “No, my view on this is ‘We Win.’”
Thatcher, however, was the second gift from God that Britain had had in the 20th century. She was, hands down, the best leader of the late 20th century.