Interesting opinion piece by presidential historian Richard Norton Smith on Bush's presidency so far:

For the condemned man in the neoconservative revolution, Secretary of State Colin Powell is having a pretty good week. Syria is safe from invasion for the time being, President Bush is talking to the prime minister of South Korea about negotiating with the North, and the road map to Middle East peace is back on the table. It seems like just yesterday that Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle were on the verge of an American Empire. So who really has the upper hand in this administration? A look at history gives a pretty convincing answer: the man in the Oval Office.



It wasn't so long ago that George W. Bush was commonly portrayed as an extension of his vice president. But since 9/11, the facile comparison between the nation's first M.B.A. president and a detached chairman of the board has lost its currency. In fact, he may be on the verge of joining a small group of presidents, all now thought of as great, who pitted their top aides against each other, fashioning an agenda from above the fray.

Consider the 1790's, when a raw republic was convulsed by foreign turmoil and the president's cabinet was polarized around two secretaries. Then it was a pro-French secretary of state and the Anglophile secretary of the Treasury: the former a slave-owning aristocrat who lived on a mountaintop and proclaimed himself a friend to humanity; the other a self-made elitist with a Calvinist belief in original sin, and no shortage of personal experience to vindicate his faith. Like fire and frost, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were temperamental opposites whom not even George Washington could reconcile.

Practicing negative politics long before it had a name, each man enlisted journalistic proxies to take his case public. To edit The National Gazette, Jefferson drafted Philip Freneau, a minor poet whose verse held less appeal than his polemics. Ostensibly hired as a State Department clerk, Jefferson's mouthpiece converted his newspaper into a battering ram directed at the administration that employed him.

Not to be outdone, Hamilton served as midwife to The Gazette of the United States. Using a variety of pseudonyms, the government's chief fiscal officer savaged his cabinet rival, whose popular image as "the great, modest, retiring philosopher" masked "the intriguing incendiary, the aspiring turbulent competitor."