Bush is busily trying to burnish his legacy, and while the Washington Post appears to be assisting in every way possible, it’s a pretty good bet that the American people have now arrived at a settled judgment that even the “liberal” media won’t be able to alter. Many of the articles discussing this subject date the significant shift in Bush’s standing to the Katrina disaster, but I would suggest that Katrina represented more of a knockout blow to an already staggering President.
Bush started his first term by trying to destroy Social Security, which didn’t set well with the 98% or more of us who will actually need that money to get by in our geezer years. But what really sent his approval on the downward slide was the now almost forgotten Terry Schiavo episode.
The American people had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he was accused of preferring to extend his vacation rather than deal with a pre 9/11 terrorist threat. But the sight of him rushing back to Washington from yet another vacation in order to inject the federal government into a personal, family issue, on the side with which most sane people disagreed sent him into a tailspin from which he never recovered.
There were those (including me) who saw the political opportunities the Schiavo crisis gave to the Democrats, but in true Democratic style, which persists to this day (I admit the post to which I linked was wrong about Reid) the Democrats ran scared. But that didn’t matter much. The American people were appalled, and when the Democrats in Congress came out of hiding they realized that Bush had suffered a huge self inflicted wound.
It was the Schiavo fiasco (along with the Social Security debacle) that set Bush up for the Katrina kill. Not many people, except the usual right wing suspects, were willing to cut him any slack when he screwed that up, precisely because they had already turned on him. Katrina may have made his position irretrievable, but it was Schiavo that turned the American people against him.
In my own humble opinion, what Bush and the Republicans did about Schiavo (with help from some scared Democrats such as Dodd, and turncoats such as Lieberman) was worse as a matter of principle than the Katrina disaster. Katrina was an example of incompetence on a grand scale. That’s not good, but it’s not evil. Schiavo was an example of a calculated attack on our system of government and on the basic human rights of our citizens, all rolled up into one. It was evil, one among many, and perhaps not the worst atrocity in which Bush and his folks engaged. But it was one to which every American can relate (and it was free of ambiguity, as opposed to the torture issue, which after all only applied to suspected terrorists), because each of us knew that one day we might have to make the same decision that Schiavo’s husband had to make, and none of us wanted the government making that decision for us, particularly a government run by religious bigots.
Update: Digby agrees.
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