Bush Fatigue Hits Bush

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 22, 2008

Does President Bush's support for a radical financial bailout represent a reversal in his political ideology? Not likely.

For one, it seems to be less a reversal than a recusal. Bush appears ideologically spent, rather than transformed. He has for all intents and purposes become the bystander-in-chief, letting others in his administration do the heavy lifting.

Furthermore, the plan concocted by two Bush appointees features some distinctive characteristics of major Bush initiatives past: It would be spectacularly expensive, primarily benefit the very rich, and grant the executive branch unlimited power with no transparency or accountability.

In Saturday's Washington Post, Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen described the bailout proposal as the latest in a series of shifts: "After a first term in which he largely adhered to conservative -- or neoconservative -- principles, Bush has moved away from long-standing positions on a range of foreign and domestic issues. In the final year of his second term, he has reached out diplomatically to North Korea and Iran, engineered a dramatic midcourse correction on the Iraq war and increased the government's role in the daily workings of the economy to a degree that would have seemed unimaginable when he first pursued the nation's highest office."

So how to explain it?

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