Of Presidents, Politicians & Expectations

No one survives being president of the United States without looking the worse for wear, but comparing George Bush's stock 2000 campaign photograph with the image above taken at a White House press conference this week is shocking. The man looks like he has aged 25 years in eight, although I suppose the more important question is how much we have.

I got into the habit of printing out and studying photos of the people about whom I was writing a few years ago. In fact, Osama bin Laden was one of the first as I tried to get the measure of a man about whom I knew next to nothing but whose name would be all over the next day's newspapers following the U.S. embassy bombings in West Africa in 1998.

In this instance I taped the Bush photo over my computer (right next to a street map of Baghdad) and looked at it long and hard. What, I wondered, was going on behind the hollow, crow's foot-accented eyes of a man who probably has always been the last one on the room to get a joke but has played an enormously sick one on the American people.

The upshot of this exercise was that I felt inextricably sad.

Sad for this lightweight who was so ill equipped to lead the U.S. into the new millennium, got such bad and often malevolent counsel in every crisis he faced (many of them of his own creation), has caused so much pain and suffering, and will slink home to Texas in a few months outwardly proud but inwardly humiliated. This is because he will know that he has squandered his legacy. And that his tenure will be picked over by historians who will conclude that he was a godawful president. Certainly one of the worst if not the worst.

That sadness eventually was supplanted by another.

Many of us are so caught up in the Sturm und Drang of the most contentious presidential campaign since forever that we lose sight of the fact that we're merely bogged down in the preliminaries before the big dance: That on January 20, 2009, a black man, white woman or grizzled war veteran will inherit a job that under the best of circumstances would be extraordinarily demanding, but will be doubly burdened with impossibly high expectations after eight years of a president who has been equal parts inept, corrupt, arrogant and capricious.

In that respect, and despite all of the talk of experience by the surviving presidential wannabes, none have the experience to repair all of the damage wrought by Bush and his puppet masters. Maybe Heracles, but certainly no mere mortal could.

That is why I believe that Barack Obama, who has the shortest resume of the three, nevertheless is best qualified to meet my expectations. This is because he is at his best and most presidential as a speaker of hard truths. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton and John McCain are hard insiders deeply invested in a dysfunctional Washington culture that makes them change averse.

For Clinton and McCain, the truth is an adjustable wrench to be set according to the political needs of the moment, and I am unable to muster even the most meager expectations for them to be better than the man they want to succeed.

Top photograph by Ron Edmonds/The Associated Press