Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Weekly Standard executive editor and Fox News personality preaches to the Crawford choir in this analysis-cum-tribute to the Bush presidency. Readers who keep pace with current events will find little new in Barnes's take on the president's policies, but what's instructive are the surprising glimpses into the personality of a man Barnes celebrates as an "insurgent leader" who's "an alien in the realm of the governing class" that despises all things Washington and revels in his status as "a revolutionary with a revolutionary vision." Indeed, the capital is a locale he regards as a "job site" at best and a "detention center" at worst where the increasingly Republican-populated Washington establishment is "reactionary" (and "Bush ignores them"), and the national press corps "reminded Bush of the liberal students he detested in his years at Yale." His disdain for newspaper-reading is well-known, but Barnes goes to great lengths to detail the president's copious book-reading habit (five to every one that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reads), from Michael Crichton's State of Fear and Margaret MacMillian's Paris 1919 to Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy and David McCullough's 1776. However, Barnes's cheerleading proves wearying after a few chapters: no matter what the topic, the president is right and everyone else is wrong. Bush, like Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, has been "prematurely judged to fall short of presidential specifications," leaving Barnes to conclude "Bush is a president of consequence." Ardent partisans will enjoy this polemical valentine, which should be read with care by readers seeking fresh insights into the mind of the 43rd president.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Fred Barnes's portrait of President Bush offers an inadvertent reminder of how much one year can change a presidency. His book opens on the day of the State of the Union address in February 2005, when a newly reelected and supremely confident Bush was at the height of his power. He had delivered a sweeping inaugural address promising to spread democracy throughout the world and overseen an Iraqi election that his administration interpreted as a vindication. Now Bush was planning to focus on bold reforms of Social Security and the tax system; Barnes describes him dismissing, at a lunch with journalists, a suggestion that Congress might find his plan for private Social Security accounts politically unpalatable. The Bush for whom Barnes began this apologia "controls the national agenda, uses his presidential powers to the fullest and then some, proposes far-reaching policies likely to change the way Americans live, reverses other long-standing policies, and is the foremost leader in world affairs." That bold and visionary president is no longer with us. By early 2006, far from making revolutionary proposals, Bush's assertion of presidential power had been challenged by Congress and the courts. His Social Security plan was all but discarded; his domestic standing had been badly damaged by his failure to respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina. Above all, the Iraq War had become a painful and polarizing enterprise that teetered near the brink of catastrophe. Bush appeared likely to devote most of the rest of his presidency to trying to find an honorable way out of it. Barnes, for his part, seemingly felt obliged to stitch some awkward updates into his tapestry of an all-conquering president. "Imagine if the president had won the fight for private accounts in Social Security," he argues. "And imagine if he had expanded consumer-driven health care.... Imagine further that he had gained congressional approval of lifetime IRAs and tax reform that lowers individual income tax rates.... Achieving it would have been an epic feat. And Bush, having succeeded in creating an ownership society, would be the most important and consequential domestic policy president since FDR." Only he didn't. And he's not. That's not to say that Barnes's interpretation of Bush is not insightful. The Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit convincingly describes a president who thinks and behaves "as an insurgent" in Washington, who scorns small ideas and conventional thinking and who consequently "has found it easy to overturn major policies with scarcely a second thought." Barnes portrays Bush's contempt for Washington elites and the press as a virtue that has allowed him to revolutionize both foreign and domestic policy and fashion a new form of conservatism. The case he makes for Bush's boldness is indisputable, especially in foreign affairs. But the thinness of Bush's counsel in his anti-Washington bubble also stands out. For example, Barnes describes Bush -- "a dissenter on the theory of global warming," despite the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community -- confirming his views in an hour-long conversation last year with the thriller author Michael Crichton, who "had concluded that global warming is an unproven theory and that the threat is vastly overstated." Similarly, Barnes reports that much of Bush's thinking about his global pro-democracy policy was developed in one-on-one conversations with the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, who shares the president's evangelical faith. Gerson, he says, was also the source of Bush's promise in the 2003 State of the Union address to commit $15 billion to the global campaign against AIDS over five years. (So far, Bush is close to keeping the pledge, having spent $5.2 billion in the first two years and budgeted more than $3 billion for 2006.) By this account, even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was not aware of the crusade against tyranny to which she and her department were being committed until the inaugural was all but finalized. Barnes's point is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Bush has been the prime author of some of his boldest policies. That may be true of his press for democracy in the Middle East, but Barnes's argument that Bush revolutionized American thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nonsensical. It's true that U.S. policy has come a long way from President Clinton's 2000 attempt to broker a comprehensive peace accord at Camp David. But Bush merely followed the lead of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who first convinced him to adopt a "road map" calling for gradual steps toward a two-state solution based on Palestinian "performance," then just as easily induced the president to back the opposite approach -- a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in July. Sharon, at least, knew more about his subject than Michael Crichton. By the time Barnes visited Bush to wrap up his book in August 2005, the president's Washington "insurgency" had been overtaken by that of Iraq, a problem Barnes curiously neglects; his discussion essentially concludes with the January elections. (The prisoner-abuse scandal caused by Bush's policies on torture and the Geneva Conventions is ignored entirely.) Bush tells Barnes he's been reading 1776 by David McCullough; he takes solace in the fact that historians are still debating George Washington's legacy. "History's judgment on Bush, who has not even completed his second term, consists of nothing but conjecture," Barnes defensively observes. Of course, if future historians conclude that Bush singlehandedly remade American foreign policy and created a "strong-government" conservatism that ensured Republican dominance for decades, then Barnes's uncommon judgment of this president will look pretty good. For now, it reads like an argument that might have sounded plausible a year ago but was overwhelmed by an annus horribilis. Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post.

Reviewed by Jackson Diehl
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Crown Forum (January 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307336492
• ISBN-13: 978-0307336491
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (158 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #652,603 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

109 of 147 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Amazon has removed negative reviews.., January 21, 2006

By	S. Dryer (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

including one that I wrote just a couple of days ago. My review was negative and rather sarcastic about TV personality Fred Barnes' contention that Bush is a courageous political outsider -- which you have to agree would be an eccentric way to describe the politican son of any former President. But my review was not offensive unless, perhaps, you are Fred Barnes and your mission in life is the production of neoconservative political hagiography. Something like two thirds of viewers had found the review useful. All the same, I am not surprised it is gone, there have been hissy fits from the Right about these and other comments. Oh how they piously decry the uncivility of these unhinged moonbats!

So, when I noticed this, I checked a recent book by Michael Moore sold by Amazon. There are many equally partisan and rather less articulate reviews from the Right that are still there and that have been there for some time.

In other words, Amazon does not subject the Right to the same censorship.

Why? Does the publisher get to decide what reviews Amazon will publish? Does selective censorship add to the credibility of the process? Did you get a call from Karl?

84 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Two Mints, January 24, 2006

By	Chad Pennington III - See all my reviews

Similar to the old Certs commercials, the main point of disagreement over Fred's book will be - is it a deadly boring love letter or is it sleep inducing sycophancy? Hint: it's two mints in one. Bush destroys the best of conservatism while Barnes shines his shoes.

58 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fred and George, January 21, 2006

By	yellowdog jim "yellowdog jim" (austin, texas) - See all my reviews

Fred Barnes feels Bush is the innovative unconventional renegade firebrand revolutionizing republicans, conservatives, politics and government. Fred casts Shrub in the profile of Brando's Wild One. Now we all have a sense that Gee Dubya is reckless enough, but in the sense that he lacks adult maturity. But this is hardly what Fred intends. Fred wants us to believe Bush is the vision of steadiness amidst chaotic jungle of politics. Fred sees Bush as the later day Horatio Hornblower. Or even as Che Guevara.
Fred also sees Bush as a genius and a font of wisdom.
If I was Bush, Fred would give me the creeps.

This book is utterly ridiculous.
It is beyond absurd.
It is demented.