"I hadn't spent a lifetime planning to run for president," Bush states. "If I had, I probably would have done a few things differently when I was younger." His frank admission to having had a "habitual" personality regarding alcohol fits in well with the American confessional autobiographical tradition, not least because it gives him an opportunity to discuss the looming importance of Christianity in his life after his wild twenties and thirties. His delightful wife Laura, the Almighty and sobriety all came into his life at roughly the same time. When mixed with the onset of political ambition, it produced a combination that was to propel him — with the help of the brilliant Karl Rove, whom he describes as "like a political mad scientist" — into the White House.
For all that, he didn't spend a lifetime planning for his presidential bid. Once his father lost the 1992 election, the younger Bush's thoughts naturally gravitated in that direction, especially once he had proved a good, bipartisan governor of Texas. The death penalty aside, Bush's policies were pretty analogous to those of David Cameron's coalition today. If Bush had not coined the phrase "compassionate conservatism", one could be certain that Cameron would have. Some of this book is concerned with the educational, social security, immigration and healthcare reforms that Bush tried to institute, with varying degrees of success but with an almost Boy Scout zeal to improve the lot of the underprivileged, in a classically "Tory Wet" way. The caricature of Bush as a hard man of the Right is absurd — indeed the Tea Party often lump him with President Barack Obama as a neo-Keynesian. (This book makes every effort not to criticise his successor, even attributing the swiftly-disproven view that the surge would actually increase sectarian violence in Iraq to "a freshman senator", thereby avoiding identifying Obama by name.)
All of the tough issues — the lack of WMDs in Iraq, the Scooter Libby affair, Hurricane Katrina, the criticisms of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, waterboarding, Wall Street "greed" and so on — are discussed with total candour. Bush emerges as someone who tended to make the same decisions that any sensible, well-informed, patriotic person would have made, faced with the same circumstances. He is on occasion unable or unwilling to delve into the psyches of some of his interlocutors without evidence — why on earth didn't the Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco agree immediately to federalise the Katrina response, for example, and why didn't Saddam back down when 240,000 Coalition troops arrived on his borders in 2003? — but frankly his guess wouldn't be that much better than ours, so instead he just gives us the facts.
On occasion, the normally pachydermatous Bush can be remarkably thin-skinned. Why on earth did he feel "disgusted" and "deeply insulted" when the rapper Kanye West said on TV during Hurricane Katrina that "George Bush doesn't care about black people"? That's just the kind of moronic remark that self-promoting pop stars make all the time, and Bush's record for helping minorities in the US spoke for itself.
