Bush: is the president imploding?
Andrew Stephen
The New Statesman
His aides are jumping ship, his inner circle is torn apart by feuds and his orders are being ignored. Bush has 17 months left in the White House, but he is now a rudderless leader.
You certainly wouldn't think there was a crisis. There's no sense that the Bush administration has plunged into a shambles of epic and probably unprecedented proportions, either: Dick Cheney has gone fishing, Congress is out for the summer, and much of Georgetown has fled the August mugginess of Washington for the beaches of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons. President George W Bush himself, 61 last month, is about to break a record previously held by Ronald Reagan: before the end of this month, according to my calculations, he will have surpassed the old Gipper's record of having taken 436 days' holiday while in office.
Indeed, this past week, Air Force One touched down at Waco airport in Texas - I swear this is true - for the 66th time since Bush took office, so he could relax at his 1,583-acre "ranch" (there's not so much as a hint of any livestock to be seen or heard there) nearby. Nor should we forget - how could we? - that, barring anything extraordinary happening, the 43rd US president still has almost 17 months left in the White House.
But the symbolic meltdown of his administration came on the South Lawn of the White House on 13 August when a semi-tearful Karl Rove, 56, announced he will be leaving the administration on 31 August. Though nominally only deputy chief of staff, Rove had become increasingly indispensable to Bush since they first met 34 years ago. He was the amoral political über-strategist who somehow propelled Bush - an alcoholic who had already failed in both politics and business - to four election victories between 1994 and 2004, handing him two terms as Texas governor and then as US president. Bush bristles at the implications of Rove being described as "Bush's brain", but happily calls Rove the "boy genius" and "the architect" behind his supreme electoral triumph.
And yet, that hot August morning, the dreams of both men lay in tatters. The wheels of amorality had come full circle. Though Bush was Rove's best-known political trophy, he had also virtually single-handedly turned Texas from the stolidly Democratic state of LBJ into a strongly Republican one. I have catalogued in these pages before some of the smear tactics Rove used while doing that, such as starting a whispering campaign in 1994 that Ann Richards - Bush's Democratic rival that year and the then popular incumbent Texas governor, since deceased - was a closet lesbian.
(Continued here.)
The New Statesman
His aides are jumping ship, his inner circle is torn apart by feuds and his orders are being ignored. Bush has 17 months left in the White House, but he is now a rudderless leader.
You certainly wouldn't think there was a crisis. There's no sense that the Bush administration has plunged into a shambles of epic and probably unprecedented proportions, either: Dick Cheney has gone fishing, Congress is out for the summer, and much of Georgetown has fled the August mugginess of Washington for the beaches of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons. President George W Bush himself, 61 last month, is about to break a record previously held by Ronald Reagan: before the end of this month, according to my calculations, he will have surpassed the old Gipper's record of having taken 436 days' holiday while in office.
Indeed, this past week, Air Force One touched down at Waco airport in Texas - I swear this is true - for the 66th time since Bush took office, so he could relax at his 1,583-acre "ranch" (there's not so much as a hint of any livestock to be seen or heard there) nearby. Nor should we forget - how could we? - that, barring anything extraordinary happening, the 43rd US president still has almost 17 months left in the White House.
But the symbolic meltdown of his administration came on the South Lawn of the White House on 13 August when a semi-tearful Karl Rove, 56, announced he will be leaving the administration on 31 August. Though nominally only deputy chief of staff, Rove had become increasingly indispensable to Bush since they first met 34 years ago. He was the amoral political über-strategist who somehow propelled Bush - an alcoholic who had already failed in both politics and business - to four election victories between 1994 and 2004, handing him two terms as Texas governor and then as US president. Bush bristles at the implications of Rove being described as "Bush's brain", but happily calls Rove the "boy genius" and "the architect" behind his supreme electoral triumph.
And yet, that hot August morning, the dreams of both men lay in tatters. The wheels of amorality had come full circle. Though Bush was Rove's best-known political trophy, he had also virtually single-handedly turned Texas from the stolidly Democratic state of LBJ into a strongly Republican one. I have catalogued in these pages before some of the smear tactics Rove used while doing that, such as starting a whispering campaign in 1994 that Ann Richards - Bush's Democratic rival that year and the then popular incumbent Texas governor, since deceased - was a closet lesbian.
(Continued here.)
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