With George W. Bush suffering low approval ratings, the situation in Iraq remaining unsettled and the Republican party beset by internal squabbles over religion, foreign policy and immigration, the American conservative movement is facing an identity crisis. In this, the first of three excerpts from his new book, National Post columnist David Frum proposes a way forward.

This is part one of three. Read parts two and three.

Resident Fellow  David Frum

In 2003, I published one of the very first memoirs of the Bush administration, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Over the years since, the Bush administration has been hammered by difficulties and disappointments. And I have often found myself fighting against the administration I once served: against the prescription drug plan, against the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court, against amnesty for illegal aliens. During those fights, it was usually only a matter of time before I was sarcastically asked, "So is George Bush still 'the right man?'"

On the credit side: George Bush led the U.S. economy through its longest-ever expansion. He correctly identified the tyranny and misgovernment of the Middle East as the crucial cause of Islamic terrorism. He enhanced the security of the whole world by removing Saddam Hussein from control of the second most important Arab oil state. Bush showed courage on stem cells, and (Miers aside) he nominated excellent conservative judges.

On the debit side: So many mistakes! And such stubborn refusal to correct them when there was still time! So many lives needlessly sacrificed, so much money wasted, so many friends alienated, so many enemies strengthened.

What went wrong? Many will want to load the blame for all the disappointments of the Bush presidency on the president himself. He surely deserves much of the blame. I warned in 2003 of George Bush's stubbornness, his hastiness and his inattention to detail. I believed then that his sheer determination to prevail in the war on terror would elevate him above such limitations. In that belief I was mistaken. Bush's eagerness for bold action was again and again frustrated by his disinclination to acknowledge unwelcome realities. He persuaded himself that the regimes most responsible for the growth of radicalism--Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--could nonetheless be relied upon as allies. He publicly declared that he would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, without any strategy to make his word good. In his eagerness to avoid condemning all Muslims as terrorists, he deceived himself about the prevalence of extremism among Muslims worldwide. George W. Bush had the right instincts, but the wrong methods. He identified the right path, but stumbled when he tried to walk it.

Bush often told aides that his top political priority was to "change the party," that is, to move Republicans away from the Reagan-style conservatism of the 1980s toward a new, softer centrism. His party, however, believed that he was leading the nation back toward Reagan-style conservatism. This obvious contradiction placed Bush in a terrible bind from the very start. His failure to win a popular-vote mandate in November, 2000, tightened the bind. Bush sought to escape his dilemma through a careful balancing of policies, sometimes leaning left, sometimes right--mimicking the Bill Clinton model.

Triangulation worked for Clinton because he ceased after 1994 to try to do anything big. Clinton ran his presidency in survival mode, avoiding risks, minimizing his political vulnerabilities. Bush, however, hated "small ball." He took big risks, but he took those risks for the sake of policies radically at odds with one another.

In the war on terror, Bush triangulated between promoting democracy to defeat Islamism and supporting authoritarian allies against Islamism. He sought to defeat radical Islam with the support of radical Islam's principal backers: the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani military. He ended up running two contradictory foreign policies, and unsurprisingly, both ended badly.

At home, Bush triangulated between radical free-market reforms in Social Security and Medicare on the one hand and a huge expansion in government's grip upon prescription drugs, farming and energy on the other. He cut taxes and increased spending. He sought to protect the nation from foreign terrorists while propping open the doors to huge new waves of foreign immigration. Unsurprisingly, these contradictory policies ended badly, too.

What judgment will future generations render upon George W. Bush? I hope and believe it will be a positive one, but I will predict only that neither the United States nor the Republican party can or will revert to the policies that prevailed before Bush. Not to Clintonism, because Clinton's passivity and complacency in the 1990s left the United States vulnerable to the catastrophe of 9/11. And not to Reaganism, because Reagan Republicanism offers solutions to the problems of 40 years before, not to those of the 21st century. Both the country and the party have to work their way forward from the Bush experience, not back to some mythical golden past.

The American public had been trending leftward on economic and cultural issues since the middle 1990s. The shock of 9/11 halted the drift in 2002 and again in 2004. But if Republicans looked beyond the headlines, they had every reason to worry that the drift would resume as soon as the memory of 9/11 faded.

• The American economy grew handsomely between 2001 and 2006. But over those five years, the income of the median American--the worker right in the middle of the pay scale--did not rise at all. The number of people in poverty rose by 5.4 million between 2000 and 2004.
• The 9/11 attacks exposed terrifying unreadiness throughout the U.S. government. In response, the Bush administration launched the most radical overhaul of the U.S. government since the beginning of the Cold War--only to be caught almost equally unprepared by Hurricane Katrina.
• Between 2001 and 2006, at a time of intense concern for national security, at least four million people entered the United States illegally, elevating the total illegal population to at least 12 million.
• For the first time in half a century, Republicans controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate all at the same time. Instead of rolling back government, however, Republicans hugely expanded it. Federal spending under George W. Bush rose faster than under any president since Lyndon Johnson.
• In his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush pledged to prevent the world's most dangerous regimes--he named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--from acquiring nuclear weapons. Five years later, North Korea had tested a nuclear bomb and Iran looked likely to follow soon.
• Republicans won in 1994 and 2000 due in large part to voter perceptions of them as the more honest and ethical party. This asset was squandered by Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, and Alberto Gonzalez.

More than most presidents, George W. Bush has left behind a mixed record: of work begun but left unfinished, of challenges confronted but ill articulated, of heroic aspirations marred by ineffective execution, of bold initiatives and tentative results.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI. He is the author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday, 2007).