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Jewish World Review
March 23, 2006
/ 23 Adar, 5766
For Bush, too late for talk
By
Michael Goodwin
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If President Bush's press conference Tuesday carried a title, it would be "Freewheelin'." He careened all over the emotional highway — forceful, animated and impassioned one minute, jocular, testy and exasperated the next. At some points during the hour-long give-and-take, he was at his resolute best, at other moments, he looked goofy and punch-drunk. If you like roller coasters, you had to love the ride.
That's how the juiced President looked and sounded, but here's what matters: Will it work? Will his energized effort boost sagging support for Iraq, and for his presidency?
Probably not. It's past time to put up or shut up.
The majority of Americans have given up on the war and want an honorable and quick way out. And Bush has only himself to blame. Or maybe Rumsfeld and Cheney.
The public was for the war and was willing to stick with the President even as the quick toppling of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein turned into a bloody slog. They reelected Bush even though by November 2004, it was clear that nothing in Iraq was going as planned.
But time and the bloodshed have given rise to a new view of the conflict, and the administration waging it. It's the "I word" and it's a show-stopper: incompetent.
The charge that the administration is all thumbs is gaining steam and it's not coming from just die-hard Democrats. I think of it as the nondenominational argument, one that stretches across the political spectrum. Its resonance explains the polls showing independents and even some Republicans losing heart. Debates about whether we should be in Iraq have given way to doubts about whether we can recover from our blunders. As the body count mounts, and as the tales and pictures of horror multiply, the doubts grow.
While Bush now concedes those doubts and has begun to confront them more directly, Cheney adds to them every time he opens his pie hole. On Sunday, asked on CBS about his claim three years ago that "we will be greeted as liberators" and one last year that the insurgency was in its "last throes," he insisted both claims were accurate and blamed the media for distorting the facts. Echoes of Vietnam there — right down to spreading B.S. and blaming the messenger for the odor. He should just put a sock in it.
Yet, as bad as the facts are in Iraq, the incompetence charge doesn't stop there. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's performance on Katrina continues to fuel it, with even the President saying yesterday he is bewildered by photos of unused trailers in Arkansas. "I've asked [Homeland Security boss Michael] Chertoff to find out, what are you going to do with them?" the President said. "The taxpayers aren't interested in 11,000 trailers just sitting there; do something with them."
That's a snapshot of his problem: When people begin to conclude you are incompetent, every mistake, every failure, cements the belief. At this point, Bush, whose approval rating is at 36%, almost needs a mistake-free presidency to win back the public.
That's an impossible standard, especially in Iraq. Events there are apparently like the weather — beyond the President's control. Unless the American public starts to see evidence that things are getting better, or at least starts to see less bad news, support will continue to decline. No amount of talking by the President will change that.
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Michael Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Daily News. Comment by clicking here.
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