Conventional wisdom about President Bush falls into two categories.

One group sees him, at best, as an amiable dunce with a limited skill set and almost no intellectual preparation for a job that has challenged the best-prepared presidents in American history: Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Quincy Adams, Bill Clinton.

At best, this group regards Bush as a nice but immature man who is in over his head and therefore far too dependent on the agenda-driven ideologues who surround him. At worst, he is seen as a smug, spoiled and sneering frat boy who has made his way through the world with a cocksure swagger rather than any solid discipline of any sort. Bush bashers find the smart-alecky chuckle intolerable.

I am not a Bush basher.

The other group, now statistically at about 20 percent but in fact much larger than that, sees President Bush as a strong leader with an unshakeable set of core values and deep, genuine faith in God, doing what it takes to protect us from the evil-doers, even if that means a little erosion of the Constitution here and there.

Because Bush takes the Islamist threat dead seriously, he will - according to this group - be vindicated by history. Future generations will wonder how most Americans failed to see that, as the 21st century began, Islam was making one of its periodic runs toward world caliphate and that the United States had to stop the Islamic fundamentalist movement with as much raw force as necessary, no matter how unpopular that made us with the hand-wringers and appeasers of the world.

I actually met a store clerk in New Mexico a couple of years ago who said that she knew she could trust President Bush precisely because he has trouble with the English language. His malapropisms, weak hold on grammar, hesitancy, factual errors and verbal imprecisions, she said, were a sign that he is a genuine American like the rest of us, not some glib-talking Ivy League rhetorician (read Clinton or John Kerry) who is constantly trying to buffalo us. She regarded George Bush as authentic and trustworthy precisely because he is unpolished. "He's the kind of guy average Americans can really relate to."

Detractors, including a surprisingly large percentage of historians and, apparently, Jimmy Carter, believe Bush will come to be regarded as one of the worst presidents in American history, in that sorry camp that includes Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan and Warren Harding. I can hear some of you muttering, "Well, Jimmy Carter should know."

Carter may have been ineffectual, but nobody has accused him of subverting the Constitution.

Admirers believe that Bush will rise in stature as we belatedly come to realize how fundamental the threat of terrorism has been, and that he will come to be regarded as the 21st century's inarticulate answer to Harry Truman. This may be so, but generally speaking, any administration that starts playing the Truman card (vilified in his time, revered in retrospect) is in tatters.

Where is the truth? It's hard to know. Time will tell. I believe the truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the polarizing extremes. I believe that, until very recently, a majority of Americans have been willing to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, on the assumption that he must know things that we are not in a position to hear, but that now in 2007 most Americans have lost confidence in the president and his righteous policies.

At the same time, I believe that every American honestly wonders whether we are in a world historical crisis of unprecedented urgency that justifies any measures, however extreme, that ensure national survival.

Or the question may be whether this is a considerable but not fundamental crisis that we might have responded to with much greater constitutional restraint and good sense. Many Americans believe that going on the offensive against Islamic terrorism was the best - really the only - thing we could do in the wake of 9/11.

Others believe we have actually made things worse in our ham-handed and largely unilateral invasion of Iraq, whose people and even whose government had nothing to do with the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Beware of those who speak with formulae, brassy conviction and certitude on either end of the Bush spectrum.

The American people might be more willing to buy the apocalyptic scenario were it not for the farce of the national government's response to Hurricane Katrina, were it not for the Bush administration's eager attention to the demands of the wealthiest Americans at a time when presumably it should be calling for unprecedented sacrifice by all of the American people in the midst of what it presents as a war of national survival and were it not for the manifold bungling of the war effort in Iraq (read Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco").

In other words, the basic failure of competence of the Bush administration has bewildered everyone, even Bush apologists, who used to shake their heads in private and are now increasingly doing so in public.

Still, even now most people seem to think that George Bush is a nice enough man with whom it would be fun to share a beer and bratwurst.

Not so with Vice President Dick Cheney. It's amazing how often the words "satanic" and "evil" are attached to him as epithets. And that's what his friends say.

Cheney is widely, though not universally, regarded as the public face of the military-industrial-petroleum complex. He's seen not only as a creature of Halliburton, the massive oil field and war zone logistics supply corporation, but as an unapologetic student of realpolitik - selfish hard-headedness rather than idealism in world political outlook. Cheney appears to espouse the view that the real world is not really about such quaint notions as constitutions, bills of rights, bewigged diplomacy or the rule of law, but rather about raw power, oil, natural gas, extraction, industrial hegemony, military technology, war, intimidation and the power of money to trump every other human concern.

Some people put it this way. George Bush is the constitutionally elected president of the United States, while Dick Cheney is the prince of the shadow world government, on temporary loan to the current administration. The actual governance of the world involves men like Dick Cheney gathering over cigars and fine whiskey at super-exclusive enclaves to decide how the resources of the world shall be extracted and distributed, where to touch off a war and where to shut one down.

Then, almost as an afterthought, these ubermensch strategize about how they are going to make their decisions appear to have something to do with national constitutions and the sweet notion of "participatory democracy." Under this scenario, George Bush is Dick Cheney's dream candidate. He actually believes all those bromides about democracy and freedom and America, yet he can be managed by the men who actually rule the world.

Is this an insane view? Maybe. But that we can even be having this discussion tells us how far we have come from the Land of Lincoln.

There are two types of people: Those who believe that we'd be better off if Bush really ran the country and Cheney faded to black, and those who believe things would be better if Cheney ran the country and Bush just did photo-ops with 4-H groups. It's the latter crowd of believers that really terrifies me.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)