Bush's Road Show: Improvised Presidential Device

When he realized that both his cause and Vietnam’s were lost, Lyndon Johnson had the good sense to retreat to the White House and wait out his term. He made the obligatory rounds of the speech circuit, but he gave up the road show. No more “We can turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley,” his words to Henry Graff in a New York Times Magazine piece from March 1966. In March 1968, Johnson’s approval rating was at 36 percent. His Vietnam policies had been murderous. His retreat was, in William Buckley’s words for America’s cluster-gag in Iraq these days, a necessary “acknowledgment of defeat.” It eked at least a watt or two of nobility out of his supernova-sized failure. President Bush’s approval is at 36 percent according to the latest Gallup poll, the lowest point of his presidency. His disapproval rating is at 60 percent. No reflection necessary, no change of course. Certainly no retreat. Just a new road show. What was remarkable about his George Washington University episode on Monday (the first of three this week) wasn’t that it was scripted as just another evangelical schmooze around a continuing atrocity of his design; that was merely in character. But that, despite the carnage of the last few days in Iraq , he managed to be virtually celebratory of the fact that GI deaths from “improvised explosive devices” are down. “Our plan,” he said, as if mouthing off the mission statement of a middling company in Houston or narrating a Military Channel documentary, “has three elements: targeting, training, and technology.” Read the rest...