Oldie but a Goodie

Tangentially tied to the Downing Street Memos, from October of last year: Ghostwriter of Bush Autobiography says:

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.”

It's interesting how this came into play the week before the election last year (I don't think I was aware of it at the time) with that now-trademark boast of "political capital to spend" actually coming from Bush's mouth just days later.

History's a fickle lady, and we're watching what an unpopular incumbent who would say and do anything to win an election gets as his just desserts.

Posted by shamanic at June 21, 2005 10:51 AM | TrackBack