Big Fat Story
The president’s powerlessness is echoed in Congress
As Bush’s powers wane, so does the grip the Republicans have on the lawmaking process. But they are determined to use every little scrap of power they have left, after their resounding defeat at the polls this month, to prevent Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats from getting their own way, even if it means preventing any new laws from passing at all. But what a time to freeze up Congress. The financial crisis is raging, but the Republican rump won’t let the Democrats introduce a second stimulus package. The Big Three auto makers are one the edge of bankruptcy and Republicans are frustrating the Democrat plans to rescue them with taxpayers’ money. As McClatchy’s David Lightman remarks, “The easier step for Democrats would be to wait two months until Barack Obama is inaugurated and the 111th Congress convenes with much larger party majorities. But economic indicators are growing more dismal by the day, concerns about last month's $700 billion financial-rescue plan keep surfacing and automakers warn they're in desperate need of cash.”
Even the protestors have lost interest.
The president’s fast waning power is evident not only from the dwindling numbers at his press conferences, or the sparseness of his daily schedule, but in the number of people turning out to protest against him while abroad. In London, at the height of the Iraq War in 2003, Bush could expect a welcoming committee of 100,000 banner waving, chanting, angry protestors. Yet when he returned in June this year barely 100 turned out to jeer. As the Washington Post observes, “The gigantic protests that used to accompany Bush's visits to Europe were a backhanded compliment -- the tribute that impotent rage pays to power. Their sheer scale testified to his status as the most powerful man on Earth. Their … absence … suggest[s] that this aura is fading fast. It all comes down to the catastrophic loss of power that overcomes all presidents. As presidential historian Robert Dallek put it, “A lame duck president is someone who in our recent history is in his second term. ... He doesn't have the clout to influence the Congress, to assert himself that effectively, even in the conduct of foreign policy, because people know he is only going to be there another two years.” Although he has inspired “Lame Duck Bush” buttons, Bush is by no means not the first president to be conspicuously impotent. Jimmy Carter was left serving out his time wandering the White House rose garden as the Iranians waited for Ronald Reagan to be sworn in before they released the American hostages. The dying days of the Bush administration have something of that pathos, perhaps because no president has been this unpopular as he comes to the end of his term, and so few in either party have expressed regret at his passing.
Photo: Itsuo Inouye/AP
Bush was doing fine until the mid-term elections in 2006 when the Democrats gained control of both Houses. Suddenly, all his favorite projects—immigration reform, energy independence, rehashing No Child Left Behind, privatizing social security—were all left swinging in the breeze. As CBS News reported, “What is apparent is that George Bush has at his disposal none—none—of the tools presidents have used to turn bad situations around: public support, party support, or skilled statecraft. He's a lame duck less than two years in to his second term. You are not being governed.” His fiercest defenders, like Mary Matalin, insisted Bush would not stand for being so conspicuously impotent. "The president is saying he is going to sprint to the finish line," she said. "The country cannot tolerate and will not tolerate two years of getting nothing done." But things got steadily worse. The wittier White House correspondents began drawing attention to the empty seats at the president’s press conferences and the president’s half hearted attempt to disguise his redundancy. Here’s the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “Eight months before the end of his second term, President Bush is forgotten but not gone. Power has shifted to Congress, attention has moved to the campaign trail, and the White House seems at times to be just going through the motions.”
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
Bush: The Lamest Duck
Unpopular, rejected, and ignored, Bush is counting the days before he can hand over the presidency to Obama. But with the financial crisis raging, there is still important business to be done. And Bush, though largely impotent, still has some powers with which he can upset the Democrats
Bush is sneaking regulations through at the eleventh hour
All presidents in modern times have done it, most famously Bush’s father George H.W.Bush who, caught by surprise by Bill Clinton’s victory, rushed through last minute regulations, orders, and rulings to complete his legacy. But Old Man Bush made a fatal error. He failed to leave 60 clear days between his regulation dump and the end of his presidency, so all Clinton had to do to rescind them was take out his fountain pen. This time George W. Bush has a lot of last minute measures and unfinished business in the pipeline, and a lot of it is highly contentious. “Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball,” wrote the New York Times. “We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.” Among the most troubling, the tightening of civil liberties, the removal of the gray wolf from the endangered species list, a relaxing of the clean air act, a restriction on women’s access to abortion, and further limits to internet gambling.
When Britain’s Gordon Brown and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy asked Bush to host an emergency summit of world leaders—the cumbersome G20—they must have hoped that America’s popular new president, armed with a landslide and ample goodwill at home and abroad, would be there. Without him, nothing could be fixed. But Obama declined the invitation with the remark, “We have one president at a time,” and Bush was left presiding over a largely meaningless gathering. “It's not clear, really, that the most important person at the table, President Bush, will have the ethical or moral authority to make a deal, because he's basically out the door. He's a lame duck,” Jeff Birnbaum told his Fox News audience. The foreign leaders learned at first hand what Americans already know: Bush is ill equipped to offer leadership through rhetoric. All through the financial crisis the president’s appeals for the people to remain calm while Congress passed Henry Paulson’s bailout plan amounted to nothing. “The core of the problem here is the president,” Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton told the Washington Independent. “He’s a weak, lame-duck president—the worst of all combinations. He can’t mobilize public opinion.” As John Morton Blum, history professor emeritus at Yale, concluded, “Bush is not a lame duck, he’s a dead duck.”
Would Bush dare a last minute raid on Iran’s nuke plant?
Bush hopes history will be kind to him about his legacy in the Middle East. If all things go well, he will have turned Saddam Hussein’s tyranny in Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Time will tell. But in other parts of the region he has left profound problems for his successor. He left the Arab-Israeli conflict until the tail end of his presidency, when he was powerless and lacking any political capital among Arab leaders. And in Iran his attempts to bully the mullahs into abandoning their nuclear ambitions also failed, with the help of his soul buddy Vladimir Putin. Bush “wants to find a way to provoke a military confrontation, or gin up some data to frighten the American people into believing a preemptive strike is defensible,” said Representative Jim McDermott. And some neo-con hawks, like the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, fully expect Bush to use his position as commander in chief to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in the hours before he hands over the seals of office to Obama. John McCain’s Beach Boys bomb, bomb Iran joke may have one final outing.
Photo: Seth Wenig/AP
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Without even reading this...When was Bush not a lame-duck president. He has consistently waited until the last minute to make any decisions, and then he pressures the American people and the Congress to pass his laws with lies. I voted for him the first time, and this is one of the few decisions in life I have made that I truly regret. My only HOPE is that Obama is 1/10th the president that Bush said he was going to be.
"Bush is by no means not the first president to be conspicuously impotent"
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