Bush the Gambler

"Congress also gave final approval last week to a landmark nuclear agreement between India and the United States, a deal that has been in the works for years and has been fiercely opposed by nuclear proliferation experts. . . .

"And to hear Bush tell it, he has no intention of slowing down in his final months. 'You know, we got a couple more hard months to go, and obviously we've got to deal with this financial situation,' Bush told reporters on Saturday after a visit to one of his boyhood homes in Texas. ' . . . There's a lot of work to be done.'"

One Republican's View

But it may be too late to change the dominant narrative. As Peter Baker writes in a New York Times Magazine story about retiring Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.): "[T]he Republican brand under President Bush has, in Davis's view, been so tarnished that, as he likes to say, 'if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf.' These will be Davis's last few weeks in Congress. He decided against re-election, disaffected by the partisanship, by a process he calls broken, by a party he considers hijacked by social conservatives. 'We're just not getting much done,' he said. . . .

"The way Davis sees it, the system has become dysfunctional. Bush has so destroyed the party's public standing and Congress has become so infected with a win-at-all-costs mentality that there is no point in staying. . . .

"As for Bush, Davis long ago lost faith. 'He's a disappointment,' Davis said. 'How else do you say it?' In his view, Bush grew isolated and surrounded himself with people who made bad decisions. The president, he lamented, failed to effectively tackle a rising deficit, Medicare and Social Security. He rose to the occasion after terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, but not after Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast. . . .

"Since Bush took office, with Republicans in charge of Congress for most of the last eight years, there has been little appetite for reaching across the aisle. The two sides, he says, are so divided that they are incapable of recognizing what he sees as the looming crisis of our time -- the massive debt accumulated during the Bush years. . . .

"The collapse of Wall Street reinforced his view that Washington has fallen down on the job. 'Nobody keeps an eye on anything unless it hurts the other party,' he said."

The Bush Critique

As we enter the last month of the presidential campaign, expect the heart of many endorsements of Barack Obama to be a scream of despair over what Bush has wrought.

Here, for instance, is the New Yorker: "The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction. . . .

"There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

"The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration's unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the 'end of the American era.'"

And here's rocker Bruce Springsteen: "I've continued to find, wherever I go, America remains a repository of people's hopes, possibilities, and desires, and that despite the terrible erosion to our standing around the world, accomplished by our recent administration, we remain, for many, a house of dreams. One thousand George Bushes and one thousand Dick Cheneys will never be able to tear that house down.