Bush, a Counter-Terrorism Fraud?

I am reading The third branch of American Government in the Times of London when I hit this paragraph:

The administration seems not to have understood that what lives by executive discretion dies by executive discretion. If the Bush administration took counterterrorism as seriously as it took the abstraction of executive power, it would have thought ahead to its own departure from office. If it truly believed that its approach to counterterrorism was correct, then from the first day of its second term it would have engaged with Congress to create institutions to outlive any particular Presidency. It would have thought about the example of the Cold War and how a democracy deals with a genuine threat to a whole way of life. In retrospect, the democratic institutions of the Cold War did a remarkable job of balancing safety and liberty over decades; pure executive discretion cannot possibly promise the same. The administration having undertaken none of these things, US counterterrorism policy today flails without long-term strategic guidance or institutional stability.

Bush perplexes me with one thing - what has been his goal these past siz years (and especially the past three). No one advocates the unitary executive theory as he does. Of the Republican presidential candidates, everyone shies away from the President. That paragraph above strikes me as true. But without a clear successor or a consensus supporting Bush's ideas, then Bush's poilicies appear mulish in more than one sense and for his own self-aggrandizement.