The Bush Verdict Is In

His Final Press Conference

I wrote about Bush's final press conference in yesterday's column.

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post today: "In his own way, the outgoing president acknowledged that the past five years have, by many measures, been one long pratfall. But he spoke as though he were an innocent bystander, watching the mishaps rather than having any culpability for them. To Bush, they were not mistakes -- just disappointments."

Massimo Calabresi writes for Time: "[T]here is no shortage of observers, some of them historians, who are willing to point out where Bush's presidency went wrong. His over-reliance on a cadre of ideological advisers who steered him in the wrong direction is often the first error cited by critics. Vice President Dick Cheney's dominance led Bush to many of the decisions he now qualifies as disappointments, as did Donald Rumsfeld's bullying leadership at the Pentagon. Bush's own ideological inclinations against regulation certainly contributed to the financial crisis. And his inexperience in foreign affairs made him unrealistic about what freedom and democracy actually mean in much of the rest of the world.

"But Bush, by his own admission, is still struggling to get a handle on where he went wrong. Asked a follow-up question about why Washington had remained so partisan despite his promise eight years ago to be a 'uniter, not a divider,' Bush said, 'I don't know,' and suggested asking others. Even his reaching for the safety of history reflects a kind of myopia. In that sense, Bush's final press conference was most revealing for what it showed about his inability to accept responsibility for his presidency."

Ted Anthony writes for the Associated Press: "The session, televised live, was offered up as a valedictory news conference. But it also proved an extraordinary glimpse behind the psychic curtain and an illuminating window into what we want -- and may not want -- out of the modern presidency.

"Bush was at turns erratic and eloquent, nostalgic and melancholy, gracious and cantankerous, regular guy-ish and resignation-era Nixonian. It all felt strangely intimate and, occasionally, uncomfortable in the manner of seeing a plumber wearing jeans that ride too low. . . .

"And the sight of a sitting president offering vague mea culpas ('Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake'), then affecting a fake whine while complaining about whiners who bemoan the hardships of the office ('Oh, the burdens, you know. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?') was just jarring.

"'I can't even construct a rationale for what they were trying to do today,' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and an expert on political communication."

Jim Drinkard writes for the Associated Press: "President George W. Bush claimed to have inherited a recession that in fact began on his watch in a legacy-polishing news conference Monday often at odds with his record." He does some fact-checking.

CNN's Campbell Brown focuses on what was perhaps Bush's single most startling disconnect from reality: His insistence that the federal response to Katrina was not slow.

"Now, many people will disagree over many aspects of the Bush legacy," Brown said. "But on the government's handling of Katrina, it's impossible to challenge what so many of us witnessed firsthand, what the entire country witnessed through the images on our television screens day and night.

"New Orleans was a city that for a time was abandoned by the government, where people old and young were left at the New Orleans Convention Center for days with no food, with no water. We were there. The whole country saw what was happening."