The decider

Steve Benen has already remarked on the cluelessness of Josh Bolten and Steve Hadley in their interview with The Post. They seem to think that if only the American public knew George W. Bush like they know George W. Bush, then his popularity would be sky high, but in reality, it isn't Bush's personality that turned 67% of the country against him, it was his policies and actions.

But this is just unintentionally hilarious.

"One of the mythologies," Hadley said, "is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president's influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we have a more pragmatic foreign policy."

"That's just hooey -- it's just hooey," the ever-polite Hadley concluded, with the strongest language he would muster for print. (Bolten chuckled and suggested earthier epithets, such as "bunk.")

But at the same time, Bolten said that one of his goals when he took over as chief of staff in the spring of 2006 was to put Bush back at the center of decision-making. From both officials' perspective, the administration got into trouble when aides tried to make big decisions without involving the president.

"He's a good decision-maker," Bolten said. "If it's important enough to be a presidential issue, we ought to expose the president to more information and more views, and we ought to let him decide."

The Post's Abramowitz fails to ask the obvious follow-up: if big decisions were being made without the involvement of the president, who was making them?