Bush: At least one legacy to be glad for?

While Pawlenty is spending an awful lot of time angling for the VP slot, The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, as discussed last week, is pushing the McCain/Rice ticket.

What Hertzberg also did is raise a legacy issue for which critics of President Bush--and perhaps even what Hertzberg calls the Republican Party's "hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists"--may be hesitant to hand him:

...a kind word for George W. Bush may be in order. By appointing first Colin Powell and then Rice to the most senior job in the Cabinet, a job of global scope, Bush changed the way millions of white Americans think about black public officials. This may turn out to the most positive legacy of his benighted Presidency.

You may buy it and you may not, but it is a tempting invitation to put aside, if only for a moment, much more evident legacy issues in favor of a comprehensive look at eight years of the letter W.