Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard columnist, today on CNN…
…there’s an ongoing Bush legacy project that’s been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President’s legacy.
“Roll out”, precisely.
To put this another way, “The Edsel was really a great automobile…far ahead of its time…under-appreciated and the victim of slanderous attacks from envious competitors…and the real reason you never see them on the road anymore is because owners, aware of the rare quality of this automobile, have locked them away in barns and milking-sheds and underground nuclear shelters to protect their truly exceptional value. Trust us on this.”
Rove and Hughes are (along with other areas of political expertise) propagandists. Surely they feel loyalty to Bush personally but also, as senior officials within that administration, they are personally invested in the historical narrative that will be established of these last eight years. As Republicans, they will be concerned as well with the reputation of their party. Myth-building, marketing, spin, propaganda…whatever word one prefers, that’s what they are going to be up to. It isn’t as if they are likely to gather up documents and records and hard-drives and emails so that future historians will have a transparent views of inner workings, after all. Not these folks.
What we are going to read/hear: “Bush has been under-estimated”…”the future will look more kindly on his bold leadership”…”the people of Iraq are free because of him”…”a man of high principle who suffered the slings and arrows for maintaining those principles”… ”brave enough to be unpopular, like Churchill”
And, as I’ve noted earlier, this is already being pushed out into the conservative media machine (Gerson most prominently so far).
