Misunderestimated Again

President Bush seems to understand what President Reagan understood before him. A president has a chance to make only two or three moves on the chessboard of history. So he’d better make them good ones.

Alternatively, he can engage in fancy footwork like Third Way dancers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, serving up eye-catching initiatives every week.

However even the best chess moves don’t necessarily look good at the time. Many people are more impressed by fancy footwork.

In his end of year piece Michael Barone reminds us why he is the dean of pundits. He just has a solid judgment. And it shows.

Before you count President Bush out, he writes, don’t forget that the first few years of every war are years of blunders and mistakes.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes.

And now that President Bush has found the right generals, we can affirm that &ldquoAmerican troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.”

Another important lesson to learn from Iraq is that social transformation works easiest from the bottom up. Our media elites are obsessed with top-down politics. They would be, that is their job: to report the doings of high politics.

But the impetus for change [in Iraq] has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Why be surprised? That’s the way it works in the US.

At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that crime and welfare were once intractable problems. That just shows how successfully we reformed welfare and crime fighting. And how wrong the folks were who wailed about millions of children thrown into the streets.

Now it seems that President Bush has learned from the fumbles of the first years in the War on Terror Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t the US famous as a nation of can-do optimists?