Matthew Dowd switched parties in 1999 to work on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. He says he believed candidate Bush’s pledge that he would bring a new spirit of cooperation to politics in Washington.

I remember hearing then-Gov. Bush making those claims back then, and I didn’t buy it for a minute. Bush learned slasher style politics at the knee of his father’s dirty trickster, Lee Atwater. I expected the political divide to be as bad as it was in the Clinton era, although I could have never predicted that Bush would divide the country before sending it off to to war. (Who could have ever expected a president to do something so dastardly.)

Now Dowd has a come to Jesus on the true character of George W. Bush:

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides….

He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.

He describes as further cause for doubt two events in the summer of 2005: the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the president’s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.

“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,” he said.”That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought.”

And here’s a recurring theme among male former admirers of the president. (Chris Matthews comes to mind.) Dowd now admits he had a huge man-crush on Dubya:

“It’s almost like you fall in love,” he said. “I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy’s personality — he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.”

[But] Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.

“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’”

It seems Dowd has had a falling-out with Karl Rove, and now disavows Rove’s “50 Plus One” campaigning strategy, which eschews consensus building in order win elections by extremely slim margins. This approach has a downside in that it requires the candidate to insult and antagonize the opposition, resultign in turning half the electorade into a mob seething in anger and resentment against the candidate after he has won.

It is hard to feel sympathetic toward Matthew Dowd now that his eyes have been opened to his colossal self-delusion about George W. Bush. As one of the principal architects of the deceptions that led to Bush’s being elected, he certainly owes his country a debt of karma — big time.

It takes cojones to admit you’ve made a colossally bad mistake, as Dowd has done, but considering the magnitude of his bad judgment, he should just get off the public stage for good.

By the way, Lee Atwater saw the light too. Shortly before he died of brain cancer, Atwater sent written apologies to Democrats he had trashed during his political career.