Post-Bush Dementia

My main worry about the Bush years is not that the President created problems so terrible that no one can undo them. My main worry is that the President has broken so many hearts and scrambled so many brains that people looking for commonsense fixes will be led by a trauma-stricken elite to do stupid things that make matters worse. Consider Scott McClellan, whose disgruntled damning memoir excerpts, published at Politico, seem as gruesome a post-mortem on the past eight years as any:

Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.

Bush has done a lot of damaging and inept things, but he has not destroyed the office of President of the United States. Subsequent holders of that office will not forever after become spontaneously unable to govern properly upon sitting at Bush’s desk or coming into contact with things Bush touched. The President does not need a minder another minder, especially not one tasked with … well, whatever it is McClellan apparently thinks a President is supposed to do.

I think I know pretty well what openness and forthrightness mean, but when it comes to transcending partisanship to achieve unity, I am lost. As certain paleocons tirelessly remind us, transcending partisanship to achieve unity is exactly what Bush did to obtain Congressional authorization for an invasion of Iraq. As libertarians know full well, there are few more comprehensive examples of partisanship transcended and unity achieved than the lickety-split creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the passage of the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, and the establishment of Federal prescription drug benefits. And as mainline conservatives are correct to point out, only the dedication of a few freaks with binoculars and canteens was able to disrupt the transcendent bipartisanship that very nearly achieved unity on illegal immigration.

McClellan’s irradiated reaction to so many years beside the most radioactive people in government is to propose a First Guru. This is somewhat like assigning a crackhead a caseworker empowered to do everything for the addict but take away their crack, but possibly even more willfully ignorant and wrongheaded. Under the clement reign of the First Guru, future administrations will find themselves encouraged to undertake bad policies so long as they do so more guilelessly than the wicked Rove-Cheney administration. Even contemplating a First Guru is to presume that Presidents of the foreseeable future will increasingly be in thrall to systemic features we are all powerless to prevent, such as Machiavellian underlings run amok and an election cycle that demands permanent campaigning.

In short, if McClellan’s proposal actually is a good idea, the game has been lost. If the question is how to recover from a bad President, the answer is not to install a Rasputin.

UPDATE: Amid the expected froth, Quin Hillyer has what ought to be conservatives’ bottom line:

there is a point at which one must separate the issue of McClellan’s classiness from that of his truthfulness and the accuracy of his observations and analysis.

There goes his chance to be on Hannity. Yet even Quin’s definition of classiness may sound a bit too coextensive for some with my definition of doglike or childlike or henchmanlike loyalty:

It really does show a decided lack of class for McClellan to knife Bush in the back like that when Bush did so much for him, etc.

Perhaps Rod’s “weasel” epithet is closer to the mark. But what did Bush ‘do’ for Scott McClellan? Hire him? Bestow his all-gracious benevolence upon him? Befleck him with the majesty of his nearness? Allegations of caesaropapism are silly, I agree, but even in a rigidly hierarchical administration the statute of limitations on obligatory political ring-kissing ought to be about five seconds. Also somehow I wonder if Bush can feel McClellan’s tiny shiv lodged somewhere between some dorsal zit and freckle or another. Whereas McClellan obviously feels like a sword from Final Fantasy has been plunged betwixt his shoulderblades. After all he did for them…!