Let the excuses begin

Here's a meme that will require further monitoring: the implicit or explicit claim that George W. Bush might be spurned by the electorate despite having been a brilliant wartime president. It's an issue that his flatterers will confront as they try to reconcile their comparisons of him to Churchill with the latter's loss of the 1945 election. So National Review's Mario Loyola says (in the course of despairing that present day Britain won't declare war on Iran) --

True enough, Britain is given to bouts of world-weary fatalism—a similar once hit Britain after World War II, and swept Churchill out of office.

Soon enough, we predict, we'll be hearing more explicitly that contemporary assessments of Bush don't matter, because, after all, even the great Winston lost in '45. Given Bush's perverse attitude to democracy, it might even be a badge of honour. Except that Bush won't have the chance to lose an election (his detachment from electoral incentives being part of the problem).

Anyway, Churchill's loss would have more to do with being out of step with an electorate that had shared the sacrifices of war and wasn't ready for pre-1939 business as usual, particularly as regards the social safety net.

Indeed, if Karl Rove were truly Machiavellian, he might have designed the Iraq war precisely so as to involve no current sacrifice by most Americans (paid for by borrowing and fought by an all-volunteer army and mercenaries) -- and therefore prone to no collectivist lurch whenever the war actually ends.