George W. Bush couldn’t win a primary today

On the night when a weird woman named Christine O'Donnell won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Delaware, the most vigorous public railing against her came from Karl Rove.

That would be George W. Bush's political architect, his brain, the Dr. Frankenstein to the presidential monster. On Fox's Republican News, Rove lamented that the GOP's formerly viable goal of taking control of the Senate had plunged down the tubes with this disastrous development in Delaware.

Rove said O'Donnell was a marginalized political figure who couldn't possibly win the general election in November. Conversely, Rove said, the mainstream Republican whom she defeated with a few thousand angry insurgent votes in this tiny state -- an establishment congressman and former governor named Mike Castle -- probably would have appealed to moderates and independents and nabbed this seat once held by Vice President Joe Biden.

So what's the problem with O'Donnell? Alas, space is limited.

She claimed to have a college degree she didn't have. She claimed to have taken master's courses at Princeton when she'd taken only one undergraduate course. She hasn't had any visible means of support for years and stands widely accused of living off her various campaigns.

She once told a TV audience that God always condemned deception so, yes, she would have told the truth if she'd been harboring Jews and gotten asked about it by the Nazis. The Lord would have provided, she said.

Oh, there's also this: O'Donnell said on MTV in the '90s that self-pleasuring was wrong as a compromise between permissive contraception and abstinence because "if he's pleasing himself, what does he need me for?"

A woman in the retirees' class asked me the morning after this Delaware development: Why are so many mainstream conservative Republicans getting beat in their own primaries -- in Utah, Nevada, Alaska and now Delaware?

The answer is two-fold. One is that they tend to have held public office, a significant sin in the eyes of the Tea Party. The other is that, from time to time, they must have let slip a modest instinct for bipartisan compromise or conciliation.

This new and heightened level of polarization, distrust and unreasonableness -- why, it's enough to make one yearn for those more moderate and reasonable days of George W. Bush.

With Rove as his Svengali, Bush worked with the late Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion, on education reform. Bush praised Ted in a State of the Union address. Bush leaned hard on Republicans in Congress to create a new federal health entitlement, a pharmaceutical benefit in Medicare.

It was Bush who kept saying we didn't have a war with Islam, but only with terrorists. It was Bush who offered up the Wall Street bailout, which probably saved our economy and most of which has now been repaid.

It was Rove who advised Bush in advancing something they called "compassionate conservatism." Some thought it oxymoronic then. It surely is now.

Bush could be a little clumsy in his thinking and articulation sometimes. Whenever he got too strident, wife Laura would reel him back. She now says, you know, that she can go along with gay marriage and abortion rights.

So I'm trying to remember what was so wrong with this George W. Bush.

Oh, yes, I recall now. There was the ruination of our economy. There was the war in Iraq and his mission-accomplished swagger. And there were those foreign and defense policies not a great deal different from those now advanced by Barack Obama.

Still, I'd like to close by saying something nice about George W. Bush. It's that he couldn't win a Republican primary right now.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.