Pointing the Finger at the White House

"Many frustrated conservatives see Mr. Bush's rescue plan, on top of his decision to invade Iraq, as cementing his legacy as a big-government conservative.

"'Bush doesn't have a conservative legacy' on the economy, said Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. 'Tax-rate reductions are the only positive achievement, and those are temporary. . . . Everything else that has happened has been permanent, and a step toward more statism.' He cited big increases in the federal budget, along with continuing subsidies in agriculture and transportation, new Medicare drug benefits, and increased federal intervention in education and housing."

Johanna Neuman and Richard Simon blog for the Los Angeles Times: "If this deal is sealed, what will history say about a president who presided over first one of the largest increases in federal spending and then one of the largest rescues for those who benefited from the spending?

"Bush's reputation as a free spender is cemented. As Veronique de Rugy of the conservative American Enterprise Institute calculates, Bush has already authorized more in discretionary spending than any recent president since the free-spending, Great Society's Lyndon Johnson.

"As for the financial crisis, widely blamed on bank deregulation approved by both parties and lax supervision during the Bush administration, Ken Duberstein, former White House chief of staff under President Reagan, told CNBC's Ben Feller that the Wall Street mess could come to rival the 9/11 terror attacks as one of the key definers of Bush's presidency."

Lame Duck Watch

Peter Baker writes in the New York Times that last week's summit at the White House "with President Bush, Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama illustrated just how much power at the top of the nation's political hierarchy has already fragmented, leaving a leadership void that complicated the path to consensus last week over the deepening turmoil on Wall Street. . . .

"What is left, though, is uncertainty about whom to follow. 'There's no leadership; nobody's leading,' said Pat Caddell, who was an adviser to President Jimmy Carter. 'The country's not looking to him to lead,' he said of Mr. Bush. 'And the Congress couldn't lead an Easter egg hunt.'

"The problem for Mr. Bush is that he has all the levers of the Oval Office without all of the authority. Even some of his own advisers concede that the country long ago tuned him out, and last week's revolt by House Republicans against his initial economic plan demonstrated his trouble asserting command even of his own party. As Ed Rollins, the White House political director under Ronald Reagan, put it cruelly but crisply on CNN on Friday: 'This isn't a lame-duck administration. This is a dead-duck administration.'. . .

"This sense of uncertain leadership has arisen repeatedly in American history, but usually after a presidential election when the next leader has actually been anointed rather than before, as now."

Daniel Dombey and Alan Beattie write in the Financial Times that "the president, who was the byword for executive authority, has failed to hold sway over the stage he once commanded.

"Today, Mr Bush's poll numbers are at record lows, Mr McCain is running as a candidate of change, and rank-and-file Republicans in the House of Representatives have flirted with open revolt over the president's rescue plan.

"'There is no such thing as a Bush Republican outside the White House, in the same way that there is now no such thing as a Jimmy Carter Democrat,' said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. 'The man has no coat-tails. He is a president with neither a party nor a constituency.'"