The trouble with the font debate and the Swift Boat Vets debate and all the other trivia that the Republicans have succeeded in dominating the news with — and, yes, the Bush service record trivia that the Democrats have fumblingly attempted to retort with — is that we will forget it all after November 2. It will be as irrelevant as outdated poll numbers.
What we will still be facing, whoever wins, is a situation abroad that gets worse by the week and an economy at home that’s sputtering. For all the commander-in-chief bravado and the rhetoric of decisiveness, President Bush has managed to distract the nation from the essential rudderlessness of his leadership. In his four years of running the country, he has majored in punting problems, fudging outcomes and delaying reckonings.
This is the Bush administration’s principal behavior pattern, its fundamental survival principle, one no doubt etched into Karl Rove’s DNA: Do whatever it takes to run the clock out. The pattern established itself, of course, in the fiasco of the Florida vote recount. It emerged in controversies as diverse as Dick Cheney’s fight to keep the doors of his energy commission closed and the pseudo-Solomonic “compromise” over stem-cell research. It’s profoundly evident in Bush economic policy, with its bogus “expiring” tax cuts designed to loot the Treasury as quickly as possible without scaring people over the resulting national bankruptcy. And it is the blueprint for how Bush’s team duped the nation into the Iraq war with a barrage of misinformation: They said whatever they had to in order to rally public support up until the launch of the invasion, when they could count on a support-our-boys dynamic to kick in.
The other part of the Bush modus operandi is, take irrevocable steps. The Bush administration has already made havoc of our fiscal health, our national defense and our hope of actually prevailing in the struggle against radical Islam. Much of what it has done can’t be undone. Short-term thinking — what do we have to do to get through the next election? — has made long-term trouble.
A small and spiteful part of me can’t help thinking, “Let Bush win — let him deal with his own mess!” Except there is no indication that a second-term Bush will take any more ownership of his messes than a first-term Bush. This, perhaps, is the ultimate irony of the Bush presidency: For all the campaign-biography mythos of a misspent youth redeemed by Jesus and a sober adulthood, George W. Bush is using the presidency to play out his own drama of irresponsibility on a nation-size stage. Once a wastrel, always a wastrel.
Bonus link: If you are still harboring any doubts about just how strategically stupid the Iraq invasion was, read Juan Cole’s essay on al-Qaida’s war aims.
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