“This is a story of politics done wrong” (p. 1). So begins William Mayer’s extensive analysis of George W. Bush’s presidency and Karl Rove’s role in it. Mayer makes clear at the outset that this point of view will permeate his analysis, so the reader is fairly warned. That is not to say that this is a book of mere opinion: Mayer uses an impressive array of analytical tools in his assessment, employing presidential polls, multivariate presidential election prediction models, historical case studies of prior presidents, party system and realignment theory, and public policy results. He deploys these numerous tools quite well throughout the book, delivering insights of great use to all students of the presidency.

Mayer’s central point is that Bush and Rove overpromised and underdelivered both electoral and policy success. His empirically strongest sections deal with Rove’s approach to elections and the consequences of that approach. Although he ran disciplined campaigns, Rove intended to “force a realignment” through his strategies and tactics, a task that Mayer correctly notes had never been accomplished by any political operative or president. Mayer contends that possible past realignments—their existence remains controversial among election scholars—were the result of larger systemic forces beyond the control or direction of any presidential campaign. According to Mayer, Rove’s post-presidency book on the 1896 McKinley campaign The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters (2015) unsurprisingly fails to capture the economic and social forces that shaped the election’s outcome beyond any campaign manipulations.

The failure of Rove’s realignment plans receives extensive documentation through Mayer’s analysis of adverse election results in 2006 and 2008 and the steady and ultimately huge decline in Bush’s job approval from 2001 to 2008. For Mayer, a key wrong step for the Bush presidency was in setting the unattainable goal of forcing a realignment and then going off course in pursuit of it.

Yet shortcomings in broader systemic analysis also appear at times in Mayer’s own analysis. The work needs more attention to the difficult systemic situation that Bush and indeed subsequent presidents have encountered. The US public in recent decades has had low trust in government, about equal levels of party identification between the two major parties, and a large and volatile faction of independent voters. That has led to big electoral swings beginning in the 1990s and elections more often than not of divided national government. It is difficult to see how Rove thought he could fashion an enduring majority-party coalition out of such unpromising materials. But it is also necessary for Mayer to note more thoroughly the difficulties Rove and Bush faced in governing such a public. Yes, their mistakes were considerable, but the challenging situation they encountered deserves more consistent attention from Mayer.

Rove dominates Mayer’s attention in the first six chapters of the book, but he largely vanishes as Mayer surveys the administration’s foreign policies. The author’s attention in these chapters is on Bush’s information-gathering and decision-making style, which he finds wholly deficient during the Iraq War occupation. Mayer does not condemn the handling of the beginning of the Iraq War but spares no censure of the occupation, declaring Donald Rumsfeld the worst secretary of defense in US history (p. 163). Bush, through his inattention to the mounting problems in Iraq and his failure both to explain his policy and rebut his critics, made a bad situation worse.

That helped spawn electoral defeat for the GOP in 2006, low presidential job approval, and the end of realignment dreams. Mayer gives Bush some credit for a successful military surge but argues that it, and Rumsfeld’s departure, should have come much earlier. Rove does come in for criticism as an adviser who should have warned Bush earlier to change his Iraq policies and rhetorical approach.

Mayer’s domestic policy chapters discuss the short life and troubled fate of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” Assessing the policies the administration gathered under this rubric, Mayer finds little coherence among them. They included the badly designed and unpopular No Child Left Behind national education policy, the large expansion of entitlement spending with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the low-priority faith-based initiative to increase involvement of religious organizations in social program provision, and failed efforts at immigration reform. The administration paid sporadic rhetorical attention to the “compassionate conservative” bag of policies, and Bush himself stopped using the term later in his presidency. Alongside these policies was the administration’s traditional GOP embrace of tax cuts, opposition to abortion rights, appointment of conservative judges, and attempts at deregulation.

Did all this add up to a new and lasting version of Republicanism as Bush and Rove at times claimed? Mayer notes that “Reagan Republicans” persisted into the twenty-first century as a political faction with an identifiable ideology and set of policy positions, but “G. W. Bush Republicans” have not survived as an identifiable force since his presidency.

Mayer’s concluding chapter contains a list of valuable lessons from the reversals suffered by the Bush administration. These chestnuts are worth the scrutiny of any scholar of American politics. Of note are the following: “good politics does not always mean good government,” “never forget that war is a political endeavor,” and Mayer’s restatement of Richard Neustadt’s “the president needs help” (pp. 306–7).

There is a tone of asperity in Mayer’s lengthy work. He does sprinkle some faint praise for a few administration actions and a bit of Rove’s strategizing, but these are islands in a big pool of hostile water. The author has Republican sympathies and believes that Bush and Rove had a great opportunity but failed to capitalize on it. Bush’s incuriosity, failure to consult widely, and stubborn embrace of flawed prior decisions contributed to the lack of success. Rove’s implausible realignment dreams created tactical and strategic misfires.

One must wonder, however, given the difficulties of presidential political success in the twenty-first century, how high the ceiling for the G. W. Bush presidency really was. He came into office without a popular plurality in the election, facing the 9/11 crisis, agonizing over Saddam Hussein, and then undergoing the unforeseen economic calamity of 2008. Would another president have fared much better? Was there a set of policies on offer likely to provide political and policy success? Was there a way to successfully counter Saddam Hussein short of removal? Could a public riven with partisan divisions and teeming with low trust in government persist in rallying to any president’s cause?

Obama and Trump have encountered similar problems. It is far from clear that there is any recipe for presidential success now, as Joe Biden may find out. That allowance, couched in systemic analysis, would add a broader perspective to Mayer’s book and perhaps temper his asperity.