As Year Comes To A Close, Bush Finds Himself In A Bind

As Year Comes To A Close, Bush Finds Himself In A Bind

Why did President Bush hold a high-profile year-end press conference when he had nothing new to say about solving the biggest problem he faces? It was because he fears the question asked of President Clinton during his own final years as a scandal-ridden, troubled lame-duck chief executive: Are you still relevant?

Embarrassingly, Clinton replied (to much amusement and sarcasm) “the president is relevant here.” Turned out later he was correct, but at the time it was problematic. Bush wanted to beat reporters to the punch. An unpopular figure who has lost most of the power he arrogantly flaunted his first six years in office, the president met the press he disdains one last time to close out an unhappy year.

But the traditional gesture didn't do a thing for him. Even his attempts at chummy old-boy humor fell flat. Too fake. He insisted that he still wanted to set the national agenda, even though neither the Iraqis nor a majority of American voters think he is doing a good job of that so far.

The agenda he wants to set here at home sounds remarkably like what the Democrats have been pushing for years and he has been ignoring. And as for the agenda in Iraq, take your pick of the contradictory things he said.

He has become the king of mush, agile at the skill of political vamping but not at delivering the clear message of a decisive leader confronted with an international crisis of his own making. The blunt-talking, super-confident president of old has crumbled into a tentative figure who can't decide whether to dig our military deeper into Iraq or get the dickens out before more lives are lost.

”I'm able to help focus people's attention on important issues,” he said authoritatively. Wow. Well, he certainly did that by invading Iraq and inaccurately claiming that Iraq was connected to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, harbored weapons of mass destruction and would be thrilled to be led by us into a new democratic era in the Middle East. It is only now, after too much negative evidence and military rebellion, that he is conceding that perhaps it was not a totally clever move.

He has moved from the absolutist attitude of going all-out for victory in Iraq to something far squishier, “not winning but not losing.” There is all sorts of talk that he favors a U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, but its duration, mission, cost and effectiveness are a murky mess. It's chief advantage seems to be that the troops could be reduced before the 2008 elections. If, of course, they had accomplished anything.

The president was not his former self. Faced with an opposition Congress at last and growing anger about the Iraq war, he insisted that he had no regrets about the war and declined reporters' efforts to pry open his soul to find out what might be going on there. He had insisted in an earlier interview that despite his crumbling presidency he was sleeping well — unlike the admissions of previous presidents who have admitted to troubled nights over dubious decisions, particularly in time of war. Instead he fell back on familiar rhetoric promising “my administration can ...fashion a new way forward that can succeed in Iraq.”