Defining Dubya

...Harriet Miers didn’t want the job,” reports Robert Draper in Dead Certain...

...Dead Certain refl ects the depth and breadth of Draper’s understanding and includes fresh detail about the main players and their often-complicated relationships with Bush and with each other...

...And so it was that, as Hughes fi nished her trip, a reporter approached her for a comment on Bush’s likely Supreme Court nominee: “Harriet would be a wonderful Supreme Court justice...

...Draper repeats many of the anti-Bush myths propagated by the antiwar left and repeated uncritically in the mainstream press...

...But conservatives, who had waited years for an opportunity to remake the Court, were furious that Bush had passed over so many qualifi ed candidates to select his friend from Texas...

...Draper’s portrayal of the president is often sympathetic...

...Stephen F. Hayes, senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President...

...President, he’s doing a heck of a job...

...The fi ght over the Miers nomination was a low point in the Bush administration...

...It showed...

...Administration offi cials argued ad nauseam that threats must be eliminated before they become imminent...

...A candidate with an obscene war chest,” he says, “could afford to spread the fi eld and look down the road to November 7, 2000...

...It is laid out in a document cleverly entitled The National Security Strategy of the United States, published in 2002...

...Constitution...

...Why did Bush publicly compliment FEMA director Mike Brown for his agency’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina...

...For George W. Bush had made her a player in spite of herself...

...For example, he writes: “Joseph Wilson had been sent by the administration to Niger in 2002 to determine whether Saddam’s government had attempted to obtain uranium from that country...

...But after the attack on America, the contagion swept through the Beltway and insinuated itself into the minds of many—including the White House national security adviser and the president of the United States...

...He provides context for some of Bush’s gaffes that make them seem more understandable...

...Moments before Bush praised Brown—“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”—Alabama governor Bob Riley had said almost the exact same thing: “Whenever I needed anything here in Alabama, all I’ve needed to do is call Mike Brown,” Riley said...

...Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike...

...Wilson...

...On her fi rst trip to the Persian Gulf, she approached foreign dignitaries as if they were soccer moms and began with a campaign slogan: “The four E’s of diplomacy: Engagement, Exchange, Education and Empowerment...

...So why did George W. Bush pick Karen Hughes for such a critical mission...

...This seems insuffi - cient, given the impact that nonscandal had on public opinion, and on the Bush administration’s defensive posture since the affair began in July 2003...

...The agent resided in these four men, and in lesser hosts, well before September 11...

...She didn’t want to be in Washington at all...

...And contrary to Wilson’s after-the-fact claims, his reporting actually bolstered administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger...

...And, “Now, though, with the wind suddenly at his back, with no races left to run and the Republican majority behind their fearless party leader . . . well, there were no excuses, were there...

...Hughes knows Bush as well as anyone other than his wife...

...Wilson found that such a transaction had not taken place...

...And, “Blanco called Card’s bluff and stuck to her guns...

...But George W. Bush, who years earlier declared that he had seen into the soul of Vladimir Putin, speaks it fl uently...

...Draper covered Bush for Texas Monthly before he took his current job as a national correspondent for GQ, and had exceptional access to Bush and his team...

...Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he declared: Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent...

...Throughout his short political career, Bush had frequently turned to Miers for help on legal matters—from his fi rst gubernatorial campaign (1994) through his election as president in 2000 and deep into his administration...

...Leaving aside the impossibility of proving a negative, Draper here adopts the long-discredited Joe Wilson framing of the issue...

...And, “To shore up the levees and stop the bleeding, the White House pulled out all the stops...

...His familiarity with Bush is the strength of his book, and it allows him to write about the president in a way that largely avoids caricature...

...BY STEPHEN F. HAYES Dead Certain The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper Free Press, 480 pp., $28 When George W. Bush appointed Karen Hughes to be under secretary of state for public diplomacy, with specifi c orders to enhance the image of the United States in the greater Middle East, Hughes had never been to the region, had no expertise in the Muslims who largely populate it, and had never shown any real interest in it either...

...The virus metaphor might be fun, but Draper seems to misunderstand the most basic elements of the Bush administration’s national security strategy...

...And Bush himself made this point directly in his 2003 State of the Union address...

...but the story of how she came to be chosen, and why she ultimately withdrew from consideration, is a high point in Draper’s long look at the Bush presidency...

...For those who did not know her, the limits of Miers’s ambition might have been hard to gauge...

...They made this case in television interviews, in congressional testimony and public speeches, and in various white papers...

...We don’t know what His Eminence thought about his introduction to the common language of the heart...

...The administration” did not send Wilson...

...his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby...

...Unfortunately, this approach does not extend to Bush administration policies...

...Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz...

...Her words upon emerging from a meeting with an Egyptian sheikh provide one clue: “I think I was able to have a wonderful meeting with His Eminence to talk with him about the common language of the heart...

...the CIA did—at the suggestion of Mrs...

...None at all...

...Its host bodies belonged to, among others, Vice President Dick Cheney...

...Other metaphors prove even more problematic, as Draper writes, at times, beneath his r?sum...

...Draper does this throughout Dead Certain, particularly in his writing about the Iraq war and the broader war on terror...

...The conviction that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to America and therefore necessitated removal by force began as a kind of communicable agent to which some in the administration had great resistance and others not...

...And when Bush needs help on the big issues, he often seeks assistance from those most familiar to him, whatever their qualifi cations and without regard to what the rest of world might think...

...and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy...

...In one meeting, she told her host that the most famous phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance— “One Nation, Under God”—came from the U.S...

...But given Draper’s credulous recitation of the antiBush spin, readers should be grateful for the oversight...

...Draper reports in great detail about how the much-derided “Mission Accomplished” sign appeared on the deck of the USS Lincoln and suggests that criticism of Bush stemming from the sign is unfounded...

...So when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Miers seemed to him like a natural candidate to replace her...

...It is Draper’s reporting on Bush and his closest advisers that makes this volume worth reading...

...If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late...

...Draper spends just three paragraphs on the Wilson affair...