H.M.S. BushCo

Maybe Matthew Dowd is not this year’s Cindy Sheehan, but this year’s Dick Morris.

In other words, is he a convert, or just the ultimate opportunist? An honest man grown disillusioned, or the proverbial rat off the sinking ship?

The always fucking spot-on Sidney Blumenthal weighs in:

Bush's loss of the popular majority by 543,895 votes in the 2000 election was a shock to his political advisors and prompted an internal rethinking of his strategy. During the Florida contest and before the Supreme Court delivered the presidency to Bush, Dowd wrote a confidential memo to Rove that analyzed data from the recent vote and argued that there was no significant center in the electorate. "Dowd's analysis destroyed the rationale for Bush to govern as 'a uniter, not a divider,'" wrote Thomas Edsall in his book "Building Red America." Bush's confected campaign persona as a "compassionate conservative" was suddenly discarded. The "architect," as Bush called Rove, had an architect. Bush's brain had an outsourced brain. Rove's and Bush's radical imperatives derived from Dowd's conclusions…

…Dowd is perhaps the most peripheral member of the original Texas inner circle that brought Bush to power…Unlike Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is Bush's creature pure and simple, Dowd is both creature and creator. His self-involved and tortuous explanation of his disillusionment helps cast light on the banality of his motives in his original defection from Democrat to Bush Republican. However traumatic his private drama, he appears fundamentally the same opportunist, a point subtly driven home by those who know him well.

"I've known him for a while," said President Bush, asked at his press conference on Tuesday about Dowd. Bush stayed on message, reducing Dowd's defection to being overwrought about his son's shipping out to Iraq: "I understand his anguish over war. I understand that this is an emotional issue for Matthew." The Washington Post added: "Dowd, contacted later by e-mail, chose not to engage in a debate. He had said his piece. 'I don't have anything to add,' he wrote."

Dowd can have no riposte to the White House insinuation that he is a troubled person unless he breaks through his own rigidly constructed tale of conversion.

Dowd has said that the only current candidate who appeals to him is Barack Obama, for his “message of unity.” This from the man that authored the abandonment of the “uniter, not a divider” stance, and the gay marriage wedge in the 2004.

But he’s not begging for a job for the next two years. Oh, no. Dowd might leave the political world entirely: “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.”

You know who would be surprised if he was doing that? Me.