Bush strategist looks back in sadness
Matthew Dowd knows sorrow and loss. He has been divorced twice. A daughter died two months after she was born. And then there is the added heartbreak — a word he uses — of his split with President Bush.
Dowd, 46, is one of the nation’s leading political strategists, a onetime Democrat who switched sides to help put Bush in the White House, then win a second term. He spent years shaping and promoting Bush’s policies — policies that Dowd now views with a mixture of anguish and contempt.
He began expressing his disillusionment, tentatively at first, at a UC Berkeley conference in January. Since then, he has grown more forceful.
On the administration’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks: “I asked, ‘Why aren’t we doing bonds, war bonds? Why aren’t we asking the country to do something instead of just . . . go shopping and get back on airplanes?’ ” [complete article]
