Gustav's Silver Lining

"He traveled to Arizona, where he shared a birthday cake with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He gave a speech at the Pueblo El Mirage RV Resort and Country Club, where he talked at length about Medicare and Iraq but offered just a few words on Katrina. He posed for a photo holding a guitar and standing next to someone wearing a sombrero. . . .

"[T]he response to Katrina. . . became a turning point in transforming Bush from a remarkably popular president into a remarkably unpopular one. Bush's actions in the days after the hurricane hit on Aug. 29, 2005, quickly became symbols of the administration's sluggish and ineffective response to the crisis.

"In addition to the sombrero picture, there was the infamous flyover, in which Bush surveyed the havoc wreaked by Katrina from the comfort of Air Force One on his way from Crawford to Washington. Then on his first visit to the region, four days after the storm struck, Bush told Michael D. Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that he was doing 'a heck of a job' -- even as tens of thousands remained stranded in New Orleans."

Clive Crook writes in his Financial Times opinion column: "Has George W. Bush, radiating idiotic cheerfulness in the face of a total failure of disaster management, ever seemed such a simpleton, such a figurehead of epic incompetence?"

And don't forget this video from the day before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, showing Bush sitting passively as senior officials voiced dire predictions including the distinct possibility of severe flooding in New Orleans. He asked no questions. And when he spoke, it was to make an empty promise: "I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared," he said.

Bush's Legacy in the Balance

Peter Baker, in an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine story, examines Bush's final days -- and his complicated relationship with McCain.

"Eight years after their epic Republican primary battle of 2000, the first-place finisher desperately needs the second-place finisher to win in order to validate his own legacy. And the runner-up now finds himself saddled with the baggage of a man he never much liked to begin with, forced to live with a record he personally considers deeply lacking and portrayed as if he were a clone of his longtime adversary. As John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist told me, 'I'm sure McCain is thinking, Is Bush going to beat me twice?'"

By contrast, Baker writes: "Anxious denizens of Bushworld worry that McCain will beat himself and in the process take down their best chance for deliverance when it comes to the verdict of history. . . . [T]he president himself, according to friends and prominent Republicans, privately rails about what he considers McCain's undisciplined approach to the campaign and grouses about McCain's efforts to distance himself from the administration. . . .

"McCain has not called the president for advice, so Bush vents his frustrations and criticisms of Obama during phone calls and get-togethers with current and former advisers. (He and [former senior adviser Karl] Rove still meet for lunch every few weeks.)"

As for the big picture, Baker writes: "Bush's place in history depends on alternate narratives that are hard to reconcile. To critics, he is the man who misled the country into a disastrous war, ruined U.S. relations around the world, wrecked the economy, squandered a budget surplus to give tax cuts to fat-cat friends, played the guitar while New Orleans drowned, politicized the Justice Department, cozied up to oil companies and betrayed American values by promoting torture, warrantless eavesdropping and a modern-day gulag at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for people never even charged with a crime. To admirers, he is the man who freed 60 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq and planted a seed that may yet spread democracy in a vital region, while at home he reduced taxes, introduced more accountability to public schools through No Child Left Behind, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, installed two new conservative Supreme Court justices and, most of all, kept America safe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Whatever the president's virtues, they remain unappreciated in his own time. To say that Bush is unpopular only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public. He is arguably the most disliked president in seven decades."

As for Bush's state of Mind, Baker writes: "[F]riends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time. . . .