David Corn: The more Bush Grows, the more he stays the same:

My, how he’s grown! That’s the cliché tossed around by pundits and politicos about George W. Bush, deployed especially by those who never fancied W.

The plot-line: smirky boy-President, in the post-9/11 crucible, becomes a man and a true leader. Bush loyalists have simultaneously pooh-poohed and encouraged such talk. They certainly cannot admit their boss was a lightweight to start, and they deny he needed maturation. But they are eager to enhance (and exploit) his image as a strong, in-charge wartime president… The surprise is not that Bush has done all this reasonably well; the surprise would have been had he, a professional politician and presidential son who (like most pols) is surrounded by image-makers and communications specialists, not been able to seize the moment. I imagine that even Al Gore would have been able to rally the nation following the horrific assaults of September 11. Perhaps Michael Dukakis, too. (It is doubtful, though, that Republicans and conservatives would have been as supportive of a Commander Gore as the Democrats have been of Bush had Gore, like Bush, waited several weeks before initiating retaliation.)

This is not a knock on Bush, whose job approval rating appears to be approaching 137 percent. Here comes the knock: his growth has not changed much. On substance, he remains the same sort of president he was prior to September 11… Arrogant unilateralism, a continuing obsession with tax cuts for the well-heeled. The newly-somber George W. Bush, having confronted the harsh realities of war, has dropped the adolescent-like smirk, but there are some things he has not grown out of.AlterNet [thanks to BookNotes]