bush, nothing to be proud of

Like Lyndon Johnson, Bush is strangled by war
David Ignatius, daily star, March 25, 2006

Now it gets painful for George W. Bush. Iraq is wrapped around his presidency as tightly as Vietnam was around Lyndon B. Johnson's. Bush keeps telling the country he has a plan for victory, but the polls suggest the public doesn't believe it. Those big "Plan for Victory" signs at his rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, this week read more like an exhortation than a statement of fact.

Bush has lacked the tragic sensibility found in many of our great presidents. He works so hard at his show of easy informality that you rarely sense the inner man and the anguish that must be there. Watching him, you know he's wound tight even as he tries to act loose. The locker-room nicknames and the exaggerated Texas mannerisms are part of the enforced informality. The longer he stays in Washington, the more pronounced his Texas manner of droppin' his g's. It's a kind of camouflage, but it's wearing thin. This is not a president at ease.

When Bush speaks about the struggle of his presidency, it sometimes sounds as if he's talking to the mirror. Take this week's long, thinking-out-loud press conference: "I believe that my job is to go out and explain to the people what's on my mind. That's why I'm having this press conference, see? I'm telling you what's on my mind. And what's on my mind is winning the war on terror." He's ready to lead, he insists; he has made a vow to the American people. To whom are these comments directed, if not himself?

The polls suggest that Bush is losing the ability to communicate effectively about the issue that matters most to him. He has a better story on Iraq than many people seem to appreciate: Iraqi politicians are in fact coming together toward a government of national unity; Iraqi troops are improving their performance; substantial reductions in U.S. troops are likely this year. But to many Americans, judging by the polls, Bush's assertions sound like a broken record. His optimism comes across as happy talk.

Bush works hard to disguise it, but one senses the same inner conflict that afflicted Johnson as Vietnam began to go bad. In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam described LBJ's torment: "He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward." But, recalls Halberstam, "instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere."