Via Kevin Drum, Rick Perlstein explains why that “Thank you, President Bush” was planted in that Lititz lawn in the first place:

The “Reagan rebound,” he said at this morning’s panel “Bushed: Conservative Failure and the Danger the Legacy Lives On,” “allowed them to define conservative government as a success.” It had, indeed, been a conscious plan: squeeze out all the approval points they could in order to spin the press into recalling President Reagan just as they ended up doing—as popular from start to finish, across the board. And, Brad argued with forceful brilliance, that’s precisely the conservatives’ strategy for the final seven months of George W. Bush’s presidency. They’ve even admitted it: if they can just get his approval ratings up into the forties by the inauguration of the next president, they can more credibly claim to credulous reporters that Bush was at least a moderately successful president. They can conservatism hasn’t failed.

That sounds about right - with the caveat, as Kevin notes, that Reagan’s historical popularity resulted from more than this end-of-term push, it resulted from the fact he lowerd taxes, and presided over the fall of the Iron Curtain.

But 2008 isn’t 1988. Conservatism then might have appeared triumphant; now it appears that conservatism has failed, and failed miserably; there’s that core group that refuses to believe it (because conservatism, see, can never fail, it can only be failed; Bush’s problem is that he hasn’t been conservative enough). But the conservative movement realizes that the legacy of the Bush years is their own legacy; Bush was specifically the conservative president, they were behind him from day one and it was only in the aftermath of failure in Iraq and Katrina that the movement began to waver, just barely, it its support. It was after these failures that we began to hear that Bush wasn’t conservative, or wasn’t conservative enough.

Now, particularly given McCain’s (dubious) conservatism, the push is on to resurrect the old standard-bearer, and buttress their own ideological reputationin the process. But Perlstein notes there’s an opposite push going on, as well:

What if, Brad thundered from the podium (with hilarious Powerpoint slides—a liberal driving a wooden stake though the vampire conservatism, that sort of thing), there had been no Reagan Rebound? What if progressives had thought ahead and launched a concerted campaign to keep Reagan’s negatives down, where they deserved to be, of course, in the first place?

No President George H.W. Bush, certainly.

But even better. No headlines, in 1994, like “Reagan Name a Great Tool for Election”—and no chance of Newt Gingrich drafting off the public’s vague perception that being called a “Reaganite” was a desirable thing, all the way to the conservative takeover of Congress. No headlines, like the ones in 2000, reading, “Bush: I’m Ronald Reagan’s Heir.”

Because the pathetic fumes of vestigial Reagan worship are the only card they truly have to play. We cannot give them the opportunity to play that card with Bush. We also can’t let them get away with claiming Bush was somehow a betrayer of conservatism. If they do, conservatism can live to fight another day. “Don’t like Bush? Doesn’t matter. He wasn’t a conservative. Conservatism is still the greatest thing since oven-fresh baguettes. We got rid of Bush, so now we can move on to a true conservative.”

The Bush Legacy Project is investing considerable sums to render that impossible: paid ads, coordinated rapid response, online video, issue forums, bus ads, billboards, concerts—and even better, Brad promised, the “Bush Legacy Bus.” A Greyhound-sized thing, wrapped around 360 degrees with graphics making the case that Bush is conservatism, and—altogether now, Big Con readers!—conservatism has failed.

Update: Notes Atrios:

The thing is, they just can’t “sever Bush from conservatism.” The entire conservative movement hung it all on Iraq. Huggy Bear is hanging it all on Iraq. At the moment Iraq is the conservative movement. There’s nothing else. The only way to sever bush from conservatism is to sever conservatism from Iraq. And they can’t.

But of course this is why we got the “Victory in Iraq!!!” business earlier this week from Teh Leader. Conservatives wish to take what’s happening in Iraq, militarily, right at this moment, and postulate it out for the future. The fact that Teh Awesum Surge!!! clamped down on violence - but only so long as we keep it up, and Moqtada al Sadr continues to extend his cease-fire - conservatives want this to prove that Iraq, finally, is a success. But measured by the standards set at the time of the invasion - no. It’s a pretty big failure. It’s just that we’ve moved the goalposts considerably since then, redefined “success” down.

But I also tend to think that the public is sort of losing sight of Iraq because they long ago lost faith in it. People are just done with the war, emotionally. Sort of like a football game that your team lost - ahhh, screw it. At one time Iraq provoked screaming arguments; it really doesn’t anymore. I got a piece going in the print edition this week on the fifth anniversary, a version of something first appearing here, and my bet is the silence will be deafening. People have just accepted that the war will never be, or never accomplish, all they thought it might, and they’ve just moved on. And we can keep troops there or pull them out, so long as the casualty counts remain low most people have other concerns which are now coming first, like the economy or gay marriage. That dynamic changes drastically if casualties ratchet back up again, or we up the ante by attacking Iran.