RIght Cross

Goodman, sitting in his North Dallas offices on Coit Road, confirms that he and Du Pont demanded a meeting with Bartlett after the Times story appeared--though Goodman says he forgot precisely why they had the meeting, till reminded of the story and the Al Qaeda quote. He laughs when it's mentioned, as though he can't believe he could let such an egregious misstep by one of his own escape his memory. And though he disputes Bartlett's contention that Rove or any member of Bush's inner circle called to complain or force the NCPA to punish the economist-columnist, he says, yeah, absolutely Bartlett was told to stop pickin' on the president with attacks they considered personal at best and mean-spirited at worst.

"I said, 'Here's the deal. You can disagree with any Bush policy you want to,'" Goodman says, sitting in the NCPA's conference room overlooking North Central Expressway. Behind him, through the glass wall, an enormous American flag is perched on the wall; it comes from the American cemetery in Normandy and is encased in Plexiglas. It makes Goodman, a friendly man prone to punctuating his sentences with small chuckles, look a bit like George C. Scott in Patton--if Scott had been clad in a tan suit, looked like a former professor of economics at Dartmouth and Southern Methodist University and was best known as one of the thinkers behind revolutionary, controversial and influential health-care reform proposals.

"I almost always agree with the factual substance of the stuff Bruce writes," Goodman says. "But we don't want in our organization to attack people's motivations or their character or their managerial ability. That is something we want to stay away from. Let's not make it personal. Disagree with the president as much as you want to, but don't make it personal. I understood him to agree with that, and Pete Du Pont understood him to agree with that, and that is where we left it."

Until one year later, when, in October 2005, John Goodman told Bruce Bartlett he wanted him gone immediately.

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Until October 18, 2005, many readers of The New York Times had probably never heard of Bruce Bartlett or the National Center for Policy Analysis. They likely had no idea that there was a conservative think tank based in Dallas, especially one that possesses clout inside the Beltway. And they probably thought little of the story announcing his firing, buried on page 24.

If anything, they might have been struck by the headline--"In Sign of Conservative Split, A Commentator Is Dismissed"--which proved that the great divide in the Republican Party had grown an inch wider. As Richard Stevenson pointed out in that story, Bartlett's firing from the NCPA was just "the latest sign of the deepening split among conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush."

Indeed, just last week Salon ran a story bearing the headline, "Right-wingers turn against Bush." It offered testimony from former loyalists George Will, Robert Novak, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Family Research Council's Web site and the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly claiming "Bush is alienating his political base" by becoming "just another free-spending, big-government politician." Bush-bashing from the right has almost become a trend.

By month's end, Bruce Bartlett will be the trend's poster boy. On February 28, Bartlett's book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy will arrive in bookstores, adding its author to the growing list of conservatives who are lashing out at the president for his being what Bartlett calls "a pretend conservative [who] has more in common with liberals, who see no limits to state power as long as it is used to advance what they think is right."

The book's publication will officially brand him as the kind of conservative Al Franken and Jon Stewart could love: a true believer who has lost the faith, a conservative out to melt the party's Big Cheese. He will probably be invited on The Daily Show, on Air America, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, where he will be portrayed as one more right-winger who took a left turn into Liberal Country.

They will make him look as though he martyred himself for his belief that President Bush is doing a lousy job and hurting the country through his tax cuts. They will make him out to be the righteous soldier who threw himself on his sword when his leader allowed the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which will cost some $700 billion in coming years. They will celebrate his turning on Bush for nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, which Bartlett damned as an act of cronyism.

Bartlett insists he never set out to write the book that became Impostor. Originally, his was supposed to be a book about the history of the Bush administration's economic policies. Problem was, he discovered Bush and his inner circle had no economic policy, as far as Bartlett could figure. So he went after the president and his administration with a vehemence usually found in Bush's harshest critics. Its chapter headings alone read like New Republic article summaries: "Is Enron a Metaphor for Bush's Economic Policy?," "The Worst Legislation in History?," "The Inevitable Tax Increase" and "Is Bush Another Nixon?"

And for his criticism, Bartlett wound up paying the price: Last October, he was canned from his $172,000-a-year job as the NCPA's senior fellow.