Politics & Power Quote by Paul Begala

“It must kill George Bush” is the tell: Paul Begala isn’t diagnosing feelings so much as staging a political soap opera where ego is the real governing ideology. The line works because it weaponizes intimacy. We’re invited to imagine not just policy disagreement but personal torment, as if the former president’s legacy lives or dies on a popularity ranking. It’s a schoolyard frame applied to national power, and that’s exactly why it lands.

Begala’s intent is partisan but not subtle: elevate John McCain by casting him as the GOP’s moral exception, then use that elevation to diminish Bush. “Most popular and Beloved” is doing double duty. Popularity is measurable; beloved is devotional. By pairing them, Begala implies that Bush earned neither: he may have held office, but he didn’t win affection. McCain, in this telling, possesses the rare political currency of respect across enemy lines.

The subtext is also a map of Republican civil war politics in the mid-2000s. McCain’s brand - maverick, war hero, critic of party orthodoxy - let Democrats praise him without endorsing his platform. That praise wasn’t charity; it was a wedge. If the “best” Republican is the one least like Bush, then Bush’s coalition starts to look like an embarrassment, not a movement.

Begala’s cynicism is the point: politics is reduced to rivalry, envy, and status. It’s less an observation than an instrument, nudging audiences to see the GOP’s internal hierarchy as unstable and Bush’s place in it as quietly humiliating.