A Welcome Distraction
Monday, May 7, 2007; 2:50 PM
There's nothing like a royal visit to take your mind off your troubles. So today's festivities in honor of Queen Elizabeth II, complete with a lavish white-tie state dinner, come at a particularly opportune moment for the Bush White House.
It seems like there's pretty much nothing else to celebrate.
Resolute or Delusional?
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The latest cover of U.S. News (the soberest of the newsweeklies) features a picture of the president and the headline: 'Bush's Last Stand . . . IS HE RESOLUTE OR DELUSIONAL?'
Kenneth T. Walsh, the author of the cover story, starts off by describing President Bush's increasingly frequent habit of comparing himself to Lincoln and Truman.
Then Walsh quotes presidential historian Robert Dallek's assessment of the current president: "He may come across to some people as a man of principle, but a great majority see him as stubborn and unyielding. . . . And everything he touches turns to dust."
Walsh is particularly struck by "a fundamental fact about George W. Bush's presidency as it approaches what many consider a twilight stage. Despite a cascading series of setbacks that convey the impression of a White House in crisis, Bush continues to exude an aura of calm and self-confidence. Like him or not -- and he is one of the most polarizing leaders in American history -- he rarely if ever backs down or exhibits self-doubt. This intransigence infuriates his critics and delights his admirers, and it will remain perhaps the most vivid characteristic of his leadership."
In fact, Walsh writes that "even some former Bush advisers are worried that the mood is misplaced. . . .
"'We're seeing the very early demise of an administration,' says a former White House adviser to Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, with considerable sadness. 'It usually happens six months before a president leaves office in a second term, but in this case it's happening now.'"
Walsh notes that even many Republican now acknowledge the harmful effects of what I have long called Bush's Bubble: "'Isolation is inevitable in any White House,' says a former Bush aide who returned to the West Wing recently to chat with former colleagues. Now that he is out of the bubble, the former aide says, he can see an isolation he didn't recognize before. 'People in the White House are talking only to each other, reconfirming each other's and the president's perceptions and judgments,' he says."
As for the official White House view, Walsh writes that senior staffers "say Bush and his key aides do listen to advice, including counsel from many outsiders, in a constant campaign of outreach. . . . '[Bush] is constantly getting a whole range and variety of opinions,' White House counselor Dan Bartlett told U.S. News. 'I don't believe there are any blind spots in the White House.'"
And Walsh writes that White House officials "say that Bush isn't delusional at all and that history will vindicate him, just as it vindicated Lincoln and Truman. 'He believes the correctness of his policies-including the war in Iraq-may not be recognized for 10, 15 years,' says a Bush adviser."
Poll Watch
Marcus Mabry writes for Newsweek that "George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation. . . . According to the new Newsweek Poll, the public's approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.'s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979."
