Matt Wuerker Bush memoirs to haunt GOP

For Republicans looking forward to the first Bush-free election in a decade, the book publishing schedule is the bearer of bad news: Between New Year’s Day and next November, as many as five Bush administration officials — including the former president himself — will rehash history in hardback.

The literary luge ride down memory lane shoves off with a return to the economic collapse via former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s “On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System,” due out from Business Plus in January.


Former first lady Laura Bush’s White House memoir tees up next, expected from Scribner in the spring.

Former President George W. Bush’s own book, tentatively titled “Decision Points,” will follow in the fall from Random House’s Crown Publishing and will recount a dozen pivotal choices Bush faced and how he made them — a trip back to the days of “the decider” that’s bound to spark talk of what it omits as much as what it contains.

A candid chronicle from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — who told The AP that his Iraq war years would “certainly” be covered in his manuscript — is also expected to hit the shelves in the autumn, published by Penguin’s Sentinel imprint.

And onetime White House chief strategist Karl Rove’s book is also reportedly due out in 2010, although his publisher, Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster headed by Republican strategist Mary Matalin, would not confirm that date.

Nor would Threshold Editions confirm the widely reported 2011 release date for former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, which promises to be the most controversial of the lot — and Matalin could not be reached for comment on whether the decision to release the book after the midterm elections was a strategic one.

The literary look back will be supplemented by other reminders, large and small, of the Bush era, from the groundbreaking for the George W. Bush library, also scheduled for the fall (although right now that’s likely to be in November, presumably after Election Day), to the outcome of the Justice Department’s CIA interrogation probe currently under way.

The question is: What effect, if any, will all of this have on voters’ perceptions of the two parties and their candidates?

The Democrats’ reaction was not hard to predict.

“The more flashbacks of the Bush era we have, the more people will be reminded about the huge mess that Barack Obama and the Democrats inherited,” says Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “So it will remind them of why they voted for change and remind them of why they don’t want to turn back the clock.”

Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan agrees. “This will only serve to further emphasize what they continue to see from the Republican Party, which is more of the same,” he says.

“To tweak a phrase, it’s come to a point where it’s fair to say, ‘If it’s Sunday, it’s Dick Cheney.’”

The Bush montage plays right into the hands of Democrats, says Democratic strategist Douglas Schoen, who predicts that the midterm elections will be a battle between those who will try to make it a belated referendum on the Bush administration and those who will try to make it a premature referendum on the Obama administration.

“I think Obama is going to run against George Bush, as a means of deflecting attention from an incomplete agenda,” Schoen says, noting that November 2010 will likely be too soon for voters to see concrete results on the economy, health care or other Obama policies at home or abroad.

As for the Republicans, he says, their “best case is to make the election a referendum on Barack Obama, and to the extent that there are unpleasant or uncomfortable reflections, facts, inquiries, coming out — whether about the U.S. attorneys, torture, memoirs, whatever — they’re going to be employed inevitably and inexorably by the Obama administration, which is going to say, ‘Look: They’re worse.’”

Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum agrees: “A huge amount depends on how Obama’s doing. If Obama’s doing better, and we’re doing better in foreign policy, the Bush record will be magnified.”

If that’s what Democrats have got, say Republicans, bring it on.

“I think that voters are smarter than that,” says Scott Stanzel, former deputy press secretary to Bush. “I think voters will see that as a tired old tactic. Even in 2008, our candidate could have had a more compelling vision for the country. I think that Barack Obama’s success was more about his ability to articulate a vision than about the past.”

And actually, says Brian Jones, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, holding the Bush administration up against the Obama administration might not be a bad thing. The current president’s struggles suggest that there are no “magic solutions” for some of the problems his predecessor faced, he says.

“A number of the things that the Bush administration was criticized heavily for at the end of his term, like his handling of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, lack of ability to get anything done on Social Security — the Obama administration is having as much of a difficult time, if not more of a difficult time, with them,” Jones says.

“It illustrates that the presidency is a tough job, but it illustrates that [Bush is] maybe not the boogeyman that he was made out to be,” he adds.

Republican strategist Mark McKinnon goes even further. “I think George Bush’s rehabilitation is way ahead of schedule,” he says. “Voters either don’t like what Obama has done or don’t think he’s done enough. Bush’s decisiveness and clarity are starting to look good in the rearview mirror. And I think Republican candidates in 2010 are going to consider asking for his help.”

The biggest danger for Republicans is not in the books themselves but in the media coverage of them, says Stanzel, who notes that the focus is likely to be on the most newsworthy or controversial snippets. “You see one paragraph that gets focused on and replayed — and replayed and replayed — out of several hundred pages,” he says. “Four or five sentences can shape a week’s worth of coverage, and that very much has a distorting effect, I think.”

Still, he adds, it is possible to read too much into the kind of impact that even a mountain of political memoirs might have at the polls. “I would also note that the book ‘Inside of a Dog’ is currently outselling the most recently released Bush book,” he says. “So I think people read for entertainment, and they might read for enjoyment, and maybe to learn things, but I don’t think people will read books to decide what they should do in an election that’s about the present day — and about the future.”