TIME Person of the Year 2004: George W. Bush
Time highlights what makes GWB tick.
In that respect and throughout the 2004 campaign, Bush was guided by his own definition of a winning formula. “People think during elections, ‘What’s in it for me?’” says communications director Dan Bartlett, and expanding democracy in Iraq, a place voters were watching smolder on the nightly news, was not high on their list. Yet “every time we’d have a speech and attempt to scale back the liberty section, he would get mad at us,” Bartlett says. Sometimes the President would simply take his black Sharpie and write the word freedom between two paragraphs to prompt himself to go into his extended argument for America’s efforts to plant the seeds of liberty in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
I really think that Bush’s heart is in the right place, but since he’s a recent convert to the cult of freedom and democracy he operates with the predictable deficiencies of a born again zealot.