World - US;Reaping the whirlwind;Bush's Presidency ending in disaster

PLENTY of people can be blamed for the calamity on Capitol Hill on September 29th. Two-hundred and twenty-eight congressmen decided they were ready to risk another Great Depression. Nancy Pelosi made an idiotic speech damning the Republicans. Sheriff McCain claimed that he was going to ride into town to sort out the mess—and promptly fell off his horse. But there is no doubt where the lion’s share of the blame belongs: with George Bush. The dismal handling of the financial crisis over the past fortnight is not only a comment on Mr Bush’s personal shortcomings as a leader. It is a comment on the failure of his leadership style over the past eight years.
The convenient excuse for Mr Bush’s performance is that he is at the fag-end of his presidency. Public attention has shifted to the presidential candidates, and the members of the House face the electorate in a month. But this rings hollow: there is nothing about the political cycle that dictates that an outgoing president should have an approval rating of 27% and an army of enemies on Capitol Hill. Bill Clinton ended his two terms with ratings of close to 70%.
The crisis underlined Mr Bush’s two biggest personal weaknesses—his leaden tongue and his indecisiveness. He failed to explain in simple language that a crisis on Wall Street also means a crisis on Main Street. The self-styled decider was also singularly lacking in decisiveness. He handed responsibility for the bail-out to a technocrat, his treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, but then failed to provide him with the necessary political backup. He started lobbying legislators only days before the vote. He failed to travel to Capitol Hill to make a personal appeal to Congress. Worse still, he wasted political capital on a farcical photo-op meeting in the White House with the presidential candidates. Mr Clinton would have done things a lot better.

Catastrophe will probably be averted, at least for now. As The Economist went to press, it looked as if the rescue package would pass through the House of Representatives, perhaps as early as October 3rd: it was approved by the Senate on October 1st. But this was less thanks to the Bush administration than to the fact that a run on the markets has put the fear of God into legislators. Moreover, the collapse of the rescue package was part of a wider pattern of failure: almost everything that the Bush administration has attempted since 2004, most notably Social Security reform and immigration reform, has ended in failure.
This succession of failures is a verdict on Mr Bush’s leadership style. The Bush administration has been defined by two things—ruthless partisanship and an iron commitment to presidential power. In his first term Mr Bush pushed through a conservative agenda of huge tax cuts and a war against Iraq despite the fact that he had the narrowest of mandates. In his re-election bid in 2004 he relied on supercharging the conservative base rather than reaching out to middle-of-the-road voters.
The Bush administration also treated Congress with something approaching contempt. Mr Bush liked to think of himself as a CEO at the head of a government machine rather than as a politician in a town of politicians. The first directive that his vice-president, Dick Cheney, gave to his chief counsel, David Addington, was to “restore the powers of the presidency”. This contempt was unconcealed when it came to the Democrats (Joe Lieberman excepted): Mr Cheney even told Vermont’s Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor. But it extended to fellow Republicans. The White House nonchalantly undermined one Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, because it thought that it could replace him with a more pliable one, Bill Frist. It failed to keep Congress informed about important decisions, particularly on the “war on terror”, let alone involved in decision-making.
The Bush legacy
This my-way-or-the-highway partisanship destroyed Mr Bush’s ability to push through entitlement reforms. Why should the Democrats take the risk of helping to change the system when Mr Bush was likely to take all the credit for success? It also destroyed his ability to win enough Democratic support for one of the most important bipartisan measures he championed, immigration reform. On September 29th Mr Bush saw his rescue package torn apart by two groups of people who have been enraged by his political style—left-wing Democrats (who regard him as the spawn of Satan) and right-wing market fundamentalists. He also saw Congress relishing the chance to humble the imperial presidency. “This is a democracy,” remarked North Dakota’s Kent Conrad. “This isn’t a dictatorship.”
Mr Bush also paid the price for the defining cause of his presidency, the invasion of Iraq, an initiative which destroyed the bipartisan unity created by September 11th, 2001. The most stinging complaint against the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act of 2008 was that it bore an uneasy resemblance to the Iraq War Resolution of 2002. There was the same bid for untrammelled authority (Mr Paulson’s initial request for $700 billion was a mere three pages; Congress has expanded it to 450 pages); the same alarmist rhetoric (“our entire economy is in danger”); and the same insistence that Congress should act immediately. Sceptics battered the president with complaints about crying wolf.
The most damning verdict on Mr Bush this week came not from the Democrats but from the 133 Republicans who decided to vote against a Republican administration. Mr Bush devoted much of his energy as president to forging a lasting Republican majority. But over the past four years conservatives have turned against him on everything from immigration reform to financial management. Far from creating a hegemonic party, Mr Bush leaves the Republicans in the worst state they have been in for decades; riven by divisions, confused about their identity and facing Armageddon at the ballot box.