I agree with much of Adam Weinstein's post about George W. Bush bungling the fight against terrorism as a policy matter but being largely successful in restraining some of his party's Islamophobic impulses. That said this conclusion is too much:
That we must look to George W. Bush, the Ulysses S. Grant of the 21st century, as a voice of calm really says something about the state of America's collective psyche. His rule was pure ego, to be sure. But pure ego suddenly looks far preferable to the unrestrained id asserting itself at ground zero.
U.S. Grant was one of the most pro-civil-rights presidents we've ever had, and it's largely because of the preeminence of Confederate lost-cause dead-enders among Civil War historians intent on romanticizing the Confederate cause that his tenure as president is characterized as one of the worst ever. Yet aside from the disastrous Supreme Court appointments that helped undo his civil-rights legacy, Grant's record as president overall is clearly a positive one, and people at the time thought so too. As historian Sean Wilentz has pointed out, he was the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to be re-elected to a second term other than Abraham Lincoln.
