Matthew Dowd's Apostasy

Matthew Dowd made a rather public break from the Bush Administration today on the front page of the Sunday NYT. Although this normally would scarcely be front page news (we know why it wound up there), it is still interesting to read what Dowd says and thinks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have met Matthew on two occasions and liked him. Most recently I was behind the camera videoing Dowd when he spoke with PJM’s Bill Bradley at the Schwarzenegger victory party last November.

Also, one of his major criticisms of Bush is one I have leveled frequently on this blog. According to the NYT: “[Dowd] criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq.”

I couldn’t agree more, at least with the first two parts of the criticism. The third part has become moot largely because of partisanship and media bias.

The first part (my principal criticism) is Bush’s near-fatal flaw. He told us all to go shopping when he should have enlisted us all in the cause. This shows a severe lack of knowledge of basic human psychology by the president or his advisers or both. Definitely not Churchillian.

Still, I found Dowd’s apostasy peculiar. Why this and why now? It seems extremely self-serving given the world situation. It’s all about Matthew and not at all about the problems faced by civilization. He is headed off (according to the end of the article) on an individual crusade to help folks in Africa. Laudable, I suppose. Meanwhile, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are still in power in Iran, developing nukes. Musharraf is on the ropes in Pakistan with Islamists ready to inherit its already-existing nuclear arsenal. Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are arming themselves as never before, etc., etc….

… but Matthew has severed his ties with the “inept” Bush administration, the only ones around dealing with this in the slightest. Good for him. (And bad for us.)

UPDATE: Annals of the New York Times… “Israel Warns of Hamas Military Buildup in Gaza” was below the fold this morning, the Dowd Apostasy story above.