For the GOP, there’s just something about W

I spend a lot of time reading conservative blogs and news sites. In many ways, that’s where the action is these days.

Sure, Barack Obama is being charged with saving the country from war, recession, and a general sense of malaise.

(Americans who think the nation is moving in the right direction could fit into a middle school gymnasium.)

But conservatives are trying to figure out how to save the venerable Republican Party. How do you pick up the pieces? Which pieces should be picked up or abandoned?

One theme is already apparent: It’s tough saying good-bye to George W. Bush.

Columnist after columnist, they all offer nervous, uncertain apologias for our outgoing president. Surely, he is a man misunderstood. Surely he will be vindicated somehow, some way, by history.

They point to the fact that no new terror attack has struck Americans on American soil, while carefully side-stepping the fact that thousands of U.S. soldiers and civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In a column in today’s New York Times, conservative William Kristol tries to confront this “I Can’t Quit You, George W” syndrome head-on.

He compares Bush to Herbert Hoover and writes:

If Republicans and conservatives don’t come to grips with what’s happened, and can’t develop an economic agenda moving forward that seems to incorporate lessons learned from what’s happened — then they could be back, politically, in 1933.

Trust me, Republicans don’t want to be back in 1933. They didn’t land another president in the White House until 1953.

But then Kristol slips in the typical GOP dodge. “Fairly or unfairly,” he writes, “this will be viewed as George Bush’s economic meltdown.”

Fairly or unfairly?

In a way this kind of verbal dodge is understandable. Kristol and his tribe spent years defending Bush from what they perceived as a virulently hostile media culture. But that fight is over.

Sooner or later (maybe in the days after President Bush heads back to Texas?) Republican leaders will have to drop the hedging.

We now know that George W. Bush seriously damaged the country in ways that we are still struggling to understand. He also helped to decimate his own political party, one of the most important institutions in the country.

Rebuilding will mean first confronting, honestly and painfully, how things went so wrong. And that’s a job, in large part, for the Republican Party.