It’s now some seven months ago that the first real cracks in the Bush façade appeared following the Katrina mess. Flipping through the various comments after some of the White house reshuffles – and the ongoing Rumsfeld imbroglio - of recent it appears we are in the middle of peeling away another layer that somehow insulated Bush from a more definitive reckoning of his presidency. Yes, the Hewitts and Coulters remain steadfast in their support, but the ranks of critical conservatives is growing, take for instance Peggy Noonan who addresses the stubbornness and inflexibility of this presidency. One step further is former Bush-endorser Greg Djerejian who has essentially given up on this president by associating him with tragedy.

Noonan’s piece in particular brings home one of my basic peeves about this president and that is the near absence of a vision when he came to power and the lack of a core set of principles that guided him to Washington in the first place. The confrontation with terror on American soil put this administration on a certain course and in the absence of a coherent set of targets a few approximate and arbitrary markers were put in the sand. They can’t be moved, nor can there be any changes to the core team that put those markers in the sand in the first place. The reason for that is of course straightforward, although few on the right dare to make it explicit: pruning the team means pruning the Bush approach, refuting the orginal strategy. It would require a return to a point where the president is to provide the comfort that whatever the changes, his vision remains intact and the revamped new team can trust on the chief executive’s political instincts. The problem is of course that there never was a grand vision to begin with, nor can we put a lot of stock in Bush’s ability to guide, adjust and adapt.

No, this is not a move to extricate myself from my support for Bush now that the tidings have become increasingly uncertain. The Bush goals of fighting terror, and establish democracy in Iraq are just and require commitment and yes that famous term, stubbornness. But the doctrinaire approach on which it is built creates many unnecessary and often inexplicable disasters. It is the inability of the chief executive to foresee, pre-empt and address these adequately that leave many Bush-supporters with varying degrees of bitterness wondering how on earth we are going to get to that finish line in January 2009.