As Karl Rove said, his greatest mistake was not persuading George Bush against Bush's inclinations to defend his Iraq war. From that point to this very minute Republican fortunes have deteriorated to the point that when George Bush slinks out of Washington he will leave a defeated, broken and demoralized conservative movement without anyone to lead it out of the wilderness for perhaps a generation.
Historians no doubt will treat George Bush kinder than do today's journalists and they should. But historians are not usually conservatives. Any fair-minded historian of the conservative movement will identify George Bush as the single human being most responsible for the conservative crackup. As conservatives are damaged, so ultimately is the nation damaged.
George Bush has never understood that it is as much a part of his presidential oath to lead his party in a partisan sense as it is to lead the Army as commander in chief. Party politics is what makes the American political system work. It is morally wrong for someone to assume the mantle of leader of his party when he had no intention of actually leading that party (apart from campaigning for his own reelection) or promoting its principles for the good of the nation.
