Another day, yet another rat.
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, which Dowd now views with a mixture of anguish and contempt.
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Dowd was a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee, where he landed after Bush took office, and a top strategist for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign.
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Dowd stuck by Bush and managed his 2004 re-election campaign because he assumed things would change once he was in a second term. It was, he said, like ignoring doubts in hopes of saving a marriage.
I give Dowd no benefit of the doubt. I am not a political insider nor do I have any privileged information, but I could tell from the first moment that Bush appeared on the national stage that he was not a uniter, not a smart guy, not a foreign policy marvel. And anyone who lived through his term as governor of Texas could have told you what a total idiot he is.
Dowd wants us to feel for him, a good guy who was duped. Yet he turned on his party both to strategize for Schwarzenegger and Bush? Was he really so dense as to believe that these Republicans were any different, that they would truly change the tone or do anything other than enrich themselves and their rich cronies?
Matthew Dowd is an idiot if he actually believed any of this, and he is an opportunist if he didn’t.
Dowd left his job with the Republican National Committee at the end of last year.
Jeez, it certainly took him an awful long time to come to the same realizations that many of us laymen came to seven years ago.
