Rating: 
Summary: Lively and Thoughtful
Review: David Frum has a flare for bringing conservative principles to life -- and this book is no exception. In clear, uncomplicated prose, the book paints a compelling picture of President Bush's first two years in office. Frum -- a hard-liner, especially on economic issues -- was at first skeptical of Bush's pragmatic politics, and by the summer of 2001 was doubting his decision to work for the President. But Bush's leadership in the days and weeks following 9/11 convinced him that Bush was just what the country needed.This book has two main strengths. First, it portrays Bush as a decent man with a clear moral compass and a gift for leadership, and provides many illustrations of this point. Yet it is not a hagiography: Frum is careful to point out Bush's many shortcomings and missteps. Second, and in my opinion more interesting, the book provides a glimpse into the workings of Bush's team, especially the very different approaches of aides Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. The book also has three shortcomings. First, the book, not surprisingly, seems to over-estimate the importance of presidential speechwriters. For example, Frum laments the supposed weakness and banality of the President's first speech after the 9-11 bombings. If only he had listened to Frum! But no one I knew was disappointed with Bush's speech; everyone I know was relieved just to hear the President say something at all. Second, though Frum's prose nearly always sparkles, in this book he seems to try a bit too hard. Example: As Bush began his speech at the Pentagon following 9/11, "he blinked his eyes as rapidly as a Spanish dancer clicks her castanets." Oh, come on. Third, the book will soon be dated. After the war with Iraq (assuming there is one) and the 2004 elections, this book will seem very incomplete. So read it now, and catch a glimpse of what makes the Bush White House tick.
Rating:
Summary: An insight into what motivates George Bush
Review: This may well be the best book written about President George Bush until long after he leaves office -- provided his future biographers can match Frum's insight, intellect, innocence and industry. With devastating candor, reinforced by hero worship, Frum details the intensity of the control freaks who run the Bush administration. He unveils a staff more dedicated to total loyalty to a leader than is ever seen on The Sopranos, showing an image of sterile tidiness that is shocked by Clinton staffers who anything as crude as pizza at midnight. As an outsider, despite his wet puppy craving for affection, Frum offers a variety of devastating -- or magnificently uplifting -- insights into the character and goals of Bush. This is a book that will thrill every conservative and dismay anyone who thinks for himself. Frum, like Bush, is not satisfied with being right unless he can prove others wrong. Thus, the 'you are with us or with the terrorists' fanaticism; control freaks never tolerate an independent thought. It is hardly surprising that so few outside the US share this fanaticism; maybe it's because "them furriners" know that anyone who is as war with others is not at peace with themself. Let's face it: Bush has the world's toughest job. Anything he does affects the world. Nothing that 98 percent of the world's leaders do has more than a ripple impact on events; for example, a unilateral decision by Canada to launch a war on terror would heard merely as a superb example of Canadian humour instead of courageous resolve. Frum is a superb writer, analyst and story teller, skilled at using what he says is a Bush technique. He says Bush wins loyalty by sharing little personal secrets with those in a personal conversation, "thrusting a gift upon us, the most precious gift a person can offer: a little piece of himself. By revealing himself to us, he bound us to him." This book is filled with such personal insights in an effort to generate loyalty for Bush. You won't find many "insider" books that are better than Frum. So why does Bush so infuriate people? Well, if he's right, he invalidates generations of wishful dreams and empty thoughts that have guided American policy toward the Arabs for at least the past 50 years. If he's wrong, his bumbling bombast will give us generations of unrest, terror and war. Our future rests on the roll of Bush's iron dice. Whether you like or fear Bush, there's plenty here to reinforce your views in a bright, candid and easy-to-read 284 pages. Conservatives will finish it and contentedly sigh, "Thank God." With a tremor in their voice, liberals will beg, "Please, God . . ." Quite simply, Frum says, Bush intends to remake the Arab world. He sees Iraq, an ally of the Nazis in 1940, as merely the first and wobbliest domino. Bush is tired of oil patch tyrants. By the time US troops come home, he expects every Arab will know the meaning of "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." No, that isn't a Lincoln quote. It's from Theodore Parker on May 29, 1850, at the NE Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston. Like Parker, Bush intends to set in motion a great chain of events such as those which ended slavery by 1865 in the US. Frum hopes a similar vision will topple tyranny in today's Arab world. So, what is Bush like? Frum concludes, "He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed; more convention in his thinking than a leader probably should be. But outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity." Anyone, on either side of Bush's crusade to reorder, reform and remap the Arab world will find this book to be an Aladdin's treasure of fascinating information, opinions and dreams. The timing for it is perfect.
Rating: 
Summary: Unrequited yearnings...David Frum's secret diary...boring.
Review: A confused attempt by Mr. Frum to make a little money and maybe get his job back. It is hard to tell where he is going with this stuff. Mr. Frum has secret, intimate, unrequited yearnings for George Bush. Interesting? Not really.
Rating:
Summary: The White House in war and peace
Review: After reading David Frum's The Right Man, I'm a bit at a loss as to what the fuss was all about. Not to ruin the surprise, but all the Bush-critical quotes you've heard are all that you'll find in the book. By and large, the portrait the book paints of the President and those who toil for him is balanced and respectful, and judging by the apoplectic reviews by the "Saddam isn't evil, but Ashcroft is" contingent, it's annoying all the usual suspects. Good. In this book, Frum styles himself as a unreconstructed Gingrichite (albeit one largely unmoved by the social issue agenda). Frum supported Bush, not McCain, in the primaries, thus setting him apart from his fellow neoconservatives. But he openly admits he was slow to warm to candidate Bush and his "compassionate conservative" philosophy. This skepticism is a rising Republican leader isn't a first for Frum. In August 1994, Frum famously published Dead Right, which in its broad outlines proclaimed the conservative movement impotent and the Reagan presidency a failure. This was followed three months later by a 52-seat Republican gain in the House. Not anticipating September 11th and its "transformative" effect on his new subject is no doubt more forgivable than misjudging the results of a biennial election. Still, Frum's "conversion" to Bush, the palpable theme of the book, is more grudging than it needs to be. Frum goes into a fair amount of detail about the months before September 11, enough to be reminded of how remote the bite-sized politics of that era feels today. Frum's argument was that Bush wasn't doing especially well in 2001, and that he may have found himself a one-termer based on his performance those first few months. This prediction seems implausible and unnecessarily glum. My judgment then was that Bush did indeed face some stern tests domestically, but the brunt of them would arrive not in 2001 but in 2002 - with ample room for recovery in 2003. As for the charge that little got accomplished in that time, how soon we forget that what we were emerging from: the Clinton era, when virtually nothing got passed in six years. Characteristically, Bush benefited from all the low expectations coming out of the election, when critics pronounced him the functional equivalent of an Italian prime minister whose fractious minority government was near collapse. On this basis, the Washington elite simply assumed he wouldn't bother pushing a big agenda. Their first indication that Bush wasn't playing by the received wisdom was the tax cut, which Bush executed through masterfully - leaving in the dust all the mandarins who predicted in February that no tax cut would ever pass the Senate. Bush's early success seemed like the supreme vindication of the Colin Powell aphorism "You don't know what you can get away with until you try." September 11 has enabled Bush to transform the Presidency into something more meaningful than it was throughout all of the 1990s, and it's by this measure that the pre-September 11 period (and by extension the Clinton era) seems impossibly small in comparison. Frum certainly isn't the first to posit this transformation, but a few of his insights into this overanalyzed period are worth exploring further. Perhaps this book's most significant contribution is the author's account of how Bush's views on the wider implications of this conflict for the Islamic world hardened as the fall of 2001 wore on. In those initial few days, the President and everyone around voiced support for Islam as a "religion of peace" (Frum condemns this tack bitterly, but concedes there was probably no alternative to it). By November, Edward Said nemesis Bernard Lewis was speaking to the White House staff and the notion that Israel's struggle against terror was inextricably linked to Bush's war on terror was gaining currency. In a parallel evolution, Bush lost patience with Arafat and instructed his U.N. Ambassador to insert language condemning by name Arafat's own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade into any new U.N. demand for Israeli withdrawal. During this time, Frum takes great pleasure in wryly quoting conservative war hawks warning about the next Bush "wobble." After the magnificent culmination that was the axis of evil speech (yes, there's stuff in there about that, too) and Bush's June 24, 2002 call for new Palestinian leadership, it finally sunk in that the vaunted Bush betrayals were not to come. Frum's most enjoyable and original formulation involves a Civil War analogy. Would our war on terror be a "small war" to restore the status quo ante, as Copperhead Democrats had argued during the Civil War? Or had our enemies already pushed the envelope so far that nothing less than a "big war" - involving a complete social revolution - would be required to reform the slave-holding South/despotic Middle East? However distasteful the analogy, Frum's right: to secure a lasting peace, we have no choice but to attempt Radical Reconstruction once this war is over.
Rating: 
Summary: Valuable Primary Source Materials.
Review: As a warning to readers, this really is David Frum's story and not necessarily George W. Bush's. Frum does provide some interesting anecdotes and vignettes of his time in The White House, however. For that reason, it is worth reading but there is little in it as far as an in depth psychological evaluation of the President goes.
Rating: 
Summary: Top notch!
Review: As far as I can tell, there is only one problem with this book. Getting the Bush-haters to read it. Many will claim this a work of bias without ever opening the book. Others will dismiss it because of David Frum himself. From his years as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and through the several books Frum has published, he has established himself a conservative. This means most readers from the left side of the aisle will avoid this fine book like the plague. But if you think this is just another conservative writer singing praises of the President, you couldn't be more wrong. Frum has long been known to have opposed the Bush presidency. When asked to join the President's staff as a speech writer, he was at first shocked, and later quite reluctant. Throughout the book, Frum call a spade a spade. When he disagrees with something the President said or did, he tells the reader. The question of "Who is George W. Bush?" is clearly delineated throughout this book. We find the author shocked to discover a man of such virtue leading the nation from the Oval Office. We see the President, not as the bumbling idiot the media and the left have tried tenaciously to portray him as, but rather as the sly, ever calculating fox that he is. We see the President as the 'right man' for leading this nation at a time when solid and relentless perspicacity is most needed. The reader sees first hand, the oil and water mixture of a working relationship between Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. The leftist myths that the President is only a puppet and that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et. al. are truly running the nation are removed without doubt. Anyone who will read this book with an open mind will come away greatly enlightened. Admirers of George W. Bush will deepen that admiration. Dissenters still will not like the President, but they will find that, though they disagree with his politics, they cannot deny that he is a good, descent, intelligent man who is trying desperately to lead America in the right direction. Give this book a chance. You won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting "Inside" Account of the Bush Presidency
Review: Despite the fact that this book is slow at times, it, for the most part, is a riveting and candid account of what went on in the Bush white house, from its inauguration, to 9/11, to the present context of the November 2004 presidential election. David Frum, a native of Toronto, Canada, was a former economic speechwriter for George W. Bush. He actually is the author of the famous "axis of evil" statement in the 2002 State of the Union Address. Well, in actual fact, he introducted the notion of an "axis of hatred", but, due to Bush's theological vernacular, Michael Gerson, the chief speechwriter, modified it to "axis of evil". David Frum's other main book, An End to Evil, co-authored by Richard Perle, in my view, is a far more relevant and riveting manifesto on the hard-line school of thought with respect to foreign policy. Although he is of a favorable view of the president, the first several chapters convey the message that George W. Bush was destined to be a mediocre president. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, defined the Bush presidency. George W. Bush would prove to be a decisive leader - the Ronald Reagan of his time. He would respond with the declaration of war against the United States on 9/11 with the introduction and prosecution of a "war on terror" - an historic engagement between good and evil, whereby the United States leads an international coalition against terrorists and rogue states.
Rating: 
Summary: Is there a 0 star?
Review: I can't believe that an average person who doesn't know the danger of Idealism can be elected to being the President of this country in the first place. It is even more surprising to see an author to mix up religious issues with political issues in a country which is supposedly having the most educated people on earth. Why would an author become so demagogic and take much advantage from pubilc ignorance and linguistic embellishment to praise this President who only cares about tax cut that would benefit the rich people? Aren't these problems obvious enough? Is he the right man? Definitely yes for rich people. Is the author blind, or does he think that the readers are blind? I can't believe that so many sheeps think that it is a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Davie's Bushwhacked is a better book
Review: Although Frum's book is interesting and fairly entertaining, it falls short of offering a thorough critique of Bush's actions.
Instead, it plays the role of cheer-leader, pumping up Bush's very limited abilities and glossing over his embarassing lack of diplomacy and statesmanship.
Frankly, a much better book on this topic is Bushwhacked by Michael B. Davie - but only if you're interested in a balanced, insightful and analytical look at the world's most powerful individual.
Rating:
Summary: Bush 101 for Beginners
Review: David Frum writes well, is witty at times, comes across as being an honest writer when he reveals his own personal doubts, and the easy to read 280+ pages will go quickly. I have no doubt that David Frum's personal assessment of the President's attributes as a human being are anything less than his own candid and honest appraisal. That being said however, Frum's assessment of George W. Bush as a "President" seems to be narrowly focused with his speeches, often critiquing the President's performance by his words, and often, only by the short term consequences of his actions. There also seems to be more writing devoted to the author's own intimate thoughts and general observations of others during his White House stay, than there is about Bush himself. Although the book drops many inside juicy tidbits on other world figures and incidents, the reader would be wise to investigate them further on their own as the book barely scratches the surface on many of them, and in some cases, completely ignores actions taken which produced results in contradiction to the prepared spin speeches. People with short attention spans, or those looking for a easy way to renew and legitimize their practice of Bush worship, will like the book because of the abridged and simplified evaluation presented from the author's loyalist perspective. On the other hand, folks who have found much fault with the presidential policies, might find something that will evoke some sort of admiration for the man as a person, even if the book's rudimentary arguments don't change their opinion of him as a leader.
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