The last two-term Republican incumbent of the White House, Ronald Reagan was famously known as the Teflon President. Despite scandals sweeping around his administration, most notably the Iran-Contra affair, none of the mud stuck to the man in the Oval Office. So, after a momentous eight years, the old cowboy actor rode into the sunset as one of America’s more revered and popular presidents.
Not so George W. Bush. An altogether less subtle and less charismatic politician than Reagan, Bush once managed to stay ahead politically by presenting himself to the electorate as the firm, unflinching hand on the tiller, at a time when the nation was in clear and present danger. Unfortunately for him, this no longer works. With his poll ratings plunging to their lowest ever, Bush is looking increasingly like the Velcro president, to whom troubles are starting to stick fast. It was humiliating enough that his original nomination for the Supreme Court, his personal lawyer Harriet Miers was forced to withdraw her candidacy after howls of Republican as well as Democrat derision that she was totally unqualified for the job. It may be a telling indication of the president’s slackening grasp of political reality that he ever imagined for one moment that a lawyer who had never ever been a judge, was fit to sit on the highest bench in the land.
Much more serious, however is the indictment and resignation of the Vice President’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby and the very real threat of indictment that now hangs over Bush’s own top policy adviser, Karl Rove. Both men are alleged to have been behind the leak that outed as a CIA spy, the wife of the distinguished US ambassador who refused to endorse the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had been buying uranium from Niger. Eleven months after Ambassador Joseph Wilson reported privately that Iraq not buying yellow cake from the West African state, the president told the American public that it was. So Wilson, a paid-up Democrat, went public with his contradictory findings.
The key issue of course is that once again the rigged evidence with which Bush tried first to persuade the UN to invade Iraq and then used anyway with Britain’s Tony Blair to justify their independent attack on Saddam, is back center stage. Americans did not seem to care back in 2003. They still didn’t care last November when they re-elected Bush -- this time with a legitimate majority. But they care now. In the selfsame week of the White House humiliation over Harriet Miers and the indictment of Lewis Libby and the continued implication of Karl Rove, the number of the US servicemen killed in Iraq crossed the 2,000 mark. People are wanting to know how much longer American dollars and American blood are going to be poured out. They might not have worried had Saddam’s overthrow been quick and created a stable Iraq or the death had been on the Iraq side alone. Instead now they see the rising price of failure based on lies and their view is changing to anger. Could the Bush second term perhaps end like Richard Nixon’s?
