The Bush Presidency: First Appraisals.

• Author: Shogan, Robert

It is only fitting that the first book-length assessment of George Bush's tenure in the Oval Office has been propagated by committee. More precisely, a team of 11 political scientists have examined the pieces of a presidency the whole of which barely equals the sum of its parts. In the process they have provided a range of informed and sometimes clashing perspectives for examining the myths that underlie the conventional wisdom about Bush's White House leadership.

These myths reflect the minimalist outlook that in the post-Reagan era has come to dominate evaluations not just of Bush but of our entire political system. Fostered by the antigovernment, antipolitics rhetoric of Reagan and the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the minimalist creed makes a virtue out of the limitations of political leadership. Its impact is to lower standards, shrink expectations, diminish accountability, and convert the political landscape into a wasteland barren of purpose or belief

It was over this terrain that the last presidential campaign was waged, pitting one candidate who designated himself champion of a competence he could not demonstrate against another whose best-remembered phrase was the ultimately hollow injunction to read his lips. The latter candidate emerged victorious as the prototypical politician of the minimalist era-in the words of coeditor Bert Rockman, "a pastel political personality... in a ... mostly pastel time."

From these pages, three minimalist myths take shape as most important in rationalizing Bush's stewardship.

Myth 1 ...

The bifurcated presidency: Bush's strength in foreign policy, it is alleged, offsets and arguably even transcends his weakness as a domestic leader.

This myth is intended to disguise the absence of any coherent theme or policy framework, foreign or domestic. No one has done more to promote this notion of schizoid leadership than Bush himself, who with artful artlessness, as Colin Campbell points out, "took the words out of many observers' mouths by styling himself as a foreign-as against domestic-policy president." Last October, when he was up to his neck in the budget deficit and losing ground in the polls, Bush remarked on how he reveled in the challenges of foreign policy, adding glumly: "On the domestic side, here I am with Democratic majorities .. having to try to persuade them to do what I think is best. And it's complicated."

In another time a chief executive making such an admission would have risked being jeered out of town. ("A president who doesn't do domestic'? Come on!") But in this minimalist era, Bush's division of presidential labor was accorded the ultimate in solemnization-a Time magazine cover story heralding the president as "Men of the Year." "A Tale of Two Bushes," read the headline. "One finds a vision on the global stage; the other still displays none at home."

One of this book's strongest chapters, The PostCold War World," by foreign policy specialists Larry Berman and Bruce Jentleson, serves to debunk the myth that Bush's diplomatic endeavors are informed by the imagination and purpose so conspicuous by their absence from his domestic policies. The chapter also refutes the more fundamental fallacy that the president's burdensome domestic responsibilities can be neatly severed from his more gratifying role as diplomat-in-chief, as if...