George W. Bush, on the ballot again.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

One early summer day in 2000 I was summoned to the Oval Office along with several other White House staffers to get instructions from President Bill Clinton on what he wanted to say in his upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, a speech I was assigned to cowrite. But the president was in political strategist mode that day, and in the midst of downloading his thoughts on the speech he launched into a long soliloquy about the dynamics of the presidential contest and the nature of the man Al Gore was up against, Texas Governor George W. Bush. "Let me tell you something," he said at one point. "Bush is a lot more conservative than people realize."

I remember that line distinctly, because it struck me at the time as not true. From everything I'd read, Bush had governed Texas as a relative moderate, working with the Democratic legislature to pass, among other things, a sensible school reform measure. Sure he favored tax cuts, tort reform, and other hoary Republican policies, but so had his father, who as president had resisted the growing conservative extremism in his party. If anything, I thought the political danger of a Bush win would be that he'd tame the GOP's right wing and create a center-right version of Clinton's New Democratic movement, one that would be hard for Democrats to beat in 2004. I knew President Clinton had the best political instincts in the business, but on this one, I suspected he was indulging in the narcissism of small differences.

I could not have been more wrong. Clinton understood what the rest of professional Washington, myself included, did not: that a George W. Bush victory in 2000 would mark not a normal, modest, healthy swing of the political pendulum, but the start of something much more radical.

Evidence that Clinton was right began to emerge within months. There was, during the presidential debates, Bush's "fuzzy math" denial of the obvious fact that his proposed tax cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. There was the brass-knuckle way he and his fellow Republicans (including those on the Supreme Court) dealt with the election recount. There was the successful push by the White House and the GOP-led Congress to pass even bigger tax cuts than Bush had campaigned on, ignoring the assumption within the Beltway that, having lost the popular vote, Bush lacked a mandate and would therefore compromise.

These were early signs of the mendacity and partisan ruthlessness that would...