"A Good Man"

Writing about the David Kuo piece I discuss below, Amy Sullivan notes that Kuo make the seemingly obligatory "Bush is a good guy" claim before launching into his policy critique. She goes on to say:

But I guess this is where liberals and conservatives diverge. I'd much rather see the country run by a jerk of a guy who forgets his secretary's birthday and can't be bothered to remember staff member's names (much less give them nicknames) but whose policies make life better for MILLIONS OF PEOPLE than a president who gets along well with his staff and friends but whose policies hurt others.

I think this is basically right, but I also think that the real issue goes deeper. Many conservatives, it seems to me, believe that a person's public actions can only be evaluated in the light of that person's private character. Many liberals, on the other hand, seem comfortable divorcing the two and evaluating the public and the private separately and independently.

I'm fairly certain this difference has something to with the way conservatives and liberals tend to approach the issues of grace, salvation, and the possibility of a secular morality, and I'll leave a more detailed description as an exercise for the reader. But every time I hear Bush say "he's a good man" in an attempt to excuse disastrous public policy decisions that get lots of people hurt or killed, it only confirms my belief that Bush's brand of morality, regardless of how deeply held, is essentially sterile.