Meanwhile, back at the White House ... George W. Bush is in danger of becoming a forgotten President.
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is consuming most of the political oxygen, and what's left is taken up by Republican nominee John McCain's efforts to define his candidacy.
All presidents in the final year of a final mandate are lame ducks. But Mr. Bush is experiencing something unheard of for a U.S. president. He's being ignored.
Did you know, for example, that Mr. Bush will be visiting Russia this week to meet with outgoing President Vladimir Putin? Meetings between U.S. and Russian leaders used to be a big deal and the agenda for this one is important: disputes over missile defence and trade, for starters.
Yet The Wall Street Journal consigned the announcement to Page 11 and The Washington Post put in on page 5, while The New York Times figured it was good enough for page 15.
The U.S. economy teeters on the brink of recession, threatened by falling home prices and worthless mortgages; even Wall Street has lost confidence in Wall Street.
What is the President doing to avert the crisis? Who cares? Economically, what really matters is what Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is doing. Politically, what matters is what Mr. McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say they would be doing if they were in charge.
"There is very little that he will be able to do in his last year," observes Larry Berman, a political scientist who specializes in presidential politics at University of California, Davis. "It's legacy-shaping, rather than agenda-building."
The problem is that Mr. Bush's legacy is unambiguously dismal. He is leaving the economy in worse shape than he found it, with an extra $4-trillion added to the national debt for good measure.
He presided over a vast expansion, and abuse, of the powers of his office. The legacy of Guantanamo, torture and wiretaps will not soon be forgotten.
The war on terror has had few tangible successes and many apparent failures. And elsewhere in foreign policy, the record has been bleak. To take just one example: when Mr. Bush first met Mr. Putin, seven years ago Mr. Bush declared that he had looked the Russian President in the eye, "was able to get a sense of his soul," and found him "very straightforward and trustworthy." Seven years later, Russia is more powerful, more aggressive and considerably less friendly toward the United States.
Because Mr. Bush is held in such low regard by Congress and the American people - his popular approval rating is currently one of the worst ever recorded for a president in office - he is even more constrained than other lame duck presidents.
"He has neither much leverage, nor much vision," concludes Murray Weidenbaum, who was the first chairman of Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and is now honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center, a public-policy institute at Washington University in St. Louis.
While Mr. Weidenbaum credits Mr. Bush with making some astute appointments in Treasury, Defence and the White House in his second term, he agrees that Mr. Bush has become largely irrelevant.
"Just look at the campaign," he observes. "All through the primaries the Republican candidates tended to ignore Bush. They paid much more attention to Ronald Reagan. Even the Democrats seem to have lost interest in attacking Bush." ...
| • | George W. Bush: The bygone American
America: The President's Legacy The Globe and Mail (Canada), Monday, March 31, 2008 Byline: John Ibbitson |
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