George W. Bush: Handcuffed by Principle?

I'm not as convinced that President Bush was forced to sacrifice his "compassionate conservatism" in order to respond to terrorism. It seems to me that if conservatism is the ideology it claims to be, an all encompassing approach to both domestic and foreign affairs, then we have a right to expect any derrivative of that ideology to just as encompassing. Certainly President Bush's particular expression of conservatism met those demands(at least prima facie). So we are left thinking that either that either compassionate conservatism was not truly capable of responding to international challenges (which is the apparent underlying premise of your argument), or that the President simply did not follow his own ideological guidelines.

If your argument is correct, then our current President sacrificed his legacy not upon the altar of principle, but upon the altar of bad ideology. But if your argument is wrong and the second the option more accurately represents the situation (which I suspect that it does; probably not totally, however, as I supsect that both were true), then we are left with a President who sacrificed his legacy on the altar of laziness. After all, it truly is harder to build a consensus (which is an ability President Bush often boasted of), then it is to act as one (though I should add that I think President Bush made the right decision).