On April 1, 2007, “Matthew Dowd, the political strategist who helped steer [President] Bush to the White House twice, broke with the president over the war [in Iraq]. He wrote an op-ed article titled ‘Kerry Was Right,’ arguing that it was time to withdraw from Iraq, and although he could not bring himself to publish it, he gave an interview to Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, making the same point. He expressed disillusionment with the man he had helped elect, over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, [antiwar activist] Cindy Sheehan, Abu Ghraib [prison scandal], [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, and most important Iraq, where his own son was deployed as an army intelligence specialist. ‘I think he became more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in,’ Dowd said of Bush.”
– Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Page 541