'Decider': Eight Years Of Dubious Reasoning

Who could forget "shock and awe" or "the Bush Doctrine" or, for that matter, "Mission Accomplished"? Who could forget, but then again, who would want to remember? Chris Matthews, one of the true superstars of cable, makes a good case for remembering tonight with a special edition of his "Hardball" series, "The Decider," on the MSNBC network.

Detractors may scoff that the hour -- a recap of George W. Bush's eight years in the White House -- is merely an excuse for Matthews to do more Bush-bashing, gratuitous at this point with Barack Obama all but moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But here and there, Matthews does seem to be searching for something nice to say, or someone who'll say it. Mark Halperin of Time magazine, one of the many usual or unusual suspects rounded up for the taped hour, says of Bush near the show's end, "He did not want this job as much as most people who seek it." That's sort of positive, isn't it?

And yet the image of Bush that emerges is not an unfamiliar one -- the combination rich boy and cowboy who appeared to look upon the presidency as his personal entitlement, something he was owed. Once he got the job, the argument goes, he outsourced decisions and responsibilities that were rightly his, and eventually seemed to lose interest in it. Thus, for example, the ball was dropped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a policy of negligence that, says former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, left "an indelible stain on the presidency."

More indelible was the Bush response to 9/11, arguably the defining moment of the decade and not just of the Bush presidency. Early success against the Taliban in Afghanistan is overshadowed now by the war that followed. One could call the war ill-advised, but it might be more accurate to call it under-advised, with Bush again relying on his ostensibly infallible "gut" to reach a decision.

There's irony, obviously, in the show's title and the Bush remark that it comes from. At a news conference, Bush tells reporters, "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best." It sounds almost Nixonian. Bush was defending his decision to keep Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the job, though he'd reverse himself on that one later. Matthews and his experts seem to find Bush indecisive, but they may feel that, based on the decisions he did make, that he wasn't indecisive enough.

Matthews and his producers do a good job of preventing the hour from being a feeding frenzy of talking heads. Images as well as words come back to plunk responsive chords -- many of them now, in that excessively popular term, icons. There's the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled from its base as well as Saddam himself, captured and imprisoned, being humiliatingly searched for lice. Signs, signs, everywhere a sign: "Mission Accomplished," the sign infamously posted on the aircraft carrier where Bush made a splashy but premature victory lap, vs. "Help Us," handmade and plaintively held aloft from the roof of a house submerged by Katrina's flooding.

Sickening photos of prisoners being mistreated at Abu Ghraib in Iraq are contrasted with Bush declaring, "This government does not torture people." Vice President Dick Cheney, the Cardinal Richelieu of the administration, insists "there is no doubt" about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. Bush is criticized both for listening to advisers such as Cheney (who "pressured for the invasion of Iraq," Bob Woodward says) and for allegedly and recklessly shutting off input.

Did he listen to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state? Rice was "more enabler than adviser," one pundit bluntly theorizes.

"I don't think we've had as stubborn a president" as Bush, says Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, de facto leader of the anti-Bush forces in academia. Wilentz does appear to have a point, though: As the Bush years pass in review, it does look like Bush took his father's "stay the course" mantra to heedless, headstrong extremes.

No one can say for sure how kind or unkind history will be to the president, but historians are already all but unanimous in their assessment. Matthews reports that in a poll of historians taken recently, an awesome 98 percent pronounced Bush's presidency "a failure." Talk about your no uncertain terms. Meanwhile, even though Bush's television technique never really improved over the eight-year haul, video images show that the job, as it always has, took its toll: In footage from 2000, Bush looks 15 or maybe even 20 years younger than he does now.

It's doubtful that a prominent place will be found in the Bush presidential library for "The Decider," but it's a diligent, worthwhile investigation into what went wrong -- and why so often.

The Decider (one hour) airs at 5 and 7 tonight on MSNBC.