David Broder takes the Bushistas to task for overreaching in the Washington Post today.

Having armed himself with an ambitious set of goals in order to energize his government, Bush has become the victim of overreach -- the one problem he and his advisers did not anticipate.

They thought that things had gone downhill for Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton because those presidents had largely used up their "big ideas" in their first terms and were left adrift without much sense of purpose, vulnerable to their enemies, in their final four years.

So Bush set forth what any president would have to consider a breathtakingly bold agenda. As Charles O. Jones of the University of Wisconsin remarked to me in January, it was particularly striking to see "a second-term president with the smallest electoral college majority since Wilson in 1916 undertake the most ambitious agenda since Roosevelt in 1936."

We who watched the Iraq debacle rather than blindly defending one side are not surprised at all.

Mr. Broder rather dispassionately lists the missteps (though Bernie and Jimmy aren't on there, and Bolton looks to be a candidate for addition to the list), and the fascinating thing to me is, not ONE was caused by anything but themselves.

Mr. Broder's final words say it all.

The public clearly seems to be telling Bush to back off his most ambitious plans.