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American voters of George Bush’s Republican Party was total and evident across-the-board in every region outside of the Deep South.
With that humiliating development, the collapse of the Bush presidency was virtually complete. By the end of 2006, vast majorities of Americans believed that the president was untrustworthy, incompetent, and even unlikable. They believed he misled them into supporting the invasion of Iraq not by virtue of erroneous intelligence but through deliberate deceit. Americans’ dislike for George Bush was so widespread and intense that it infected the entire Republican Party.
THE ESTABLISHMENT REBELS
A fter the American electorate signaled its profound dissatisfaction with the Bush presidency, and as events in Iraq continued their downward spiral, even the Washington Establishment, including its Republican standard-bearers, abandoned the president. It is as though the country collectively acknowledged the severity of America’s crisis the administration had inflicted and resolved to take action, leaving the president standing alone—weak, isolated, and unpopular—as his war lay in ruins. By the time the president unveiled his so-called Iraq “surge” strategy at the beginning of 2007, the war in Iraq was spoken of not as a mere mistake or serious problem, but as a strategic disaster of historic proportions.
Republican senator Chuck Hagel, at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was testifying, called the escalation “morally wrong” and declared: “I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” The day after President Bush announced his “surge” strategy, Al Gore declared it “the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States.”
Such rhetoric suddenly began issuing from even moderate, establishment-defending journalists and pundits whose principal function typically is to recite Beltway conventional wisdom and the political orthodoxies prevailing among the Beltway elite. The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a vigorous champion of moderation in all things—policy, politics, and rhetoric—wrote that the president’s January 2007 “surge” speech revealed “a presidency in eclipse: He has lost the House and Senate; he has lost the public on the war; and he has attached his presidency to a riderless horse.” Similarly, CBS News’ Dick Meyer observed:

Rarely in our history has a president made a speech like this—an announcement that a large number of American soldiers will be sent to a foreign war—with less public, political, and international support. The president really is alone.
In war and politics, an essential measure of power is allies. Bush has few, and they are not powerful.

By 2007, unrestrained attacks on the president and his policies had become commonplace and were but a symptom of the wholesale insurrection by the Washington Establishment against the presidency that it had propped up for so long. The most surprising indignity suffered by the Bush presidency—and perhaps the most harmful as well—was the unabashed critical conclusion issued by the blue-chip, bipartisan panel, the so-called Iraq Study Group, or Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was composed of some of Washington’s most institutionally respected figures. Commissions of this sort are typically assembled in response to problems with the expectation that they will recommend, at most, incremental changes on the margins.
But the sheer scope of Bush’s Iraq failure, and the grave danger posed to the United States by its continuation (let alone escalation), did not permit the commission the luxury of such tempered and polite findings. Instead, the report was emphatic, at times even scathing, in its assessment that the war had gone terribly awry.
The day the report was issued, the commission’s