George W. Bush confronts a long and lonely walk down the hallway of history. There will be loyalists and radical ideologues that will remain his confidantes and treat him deferentially, but he is poised to become a man estranged from the country and the people who endured eight years of his deadly inadequacies. We will not want to talk or think about President Bush because he will be a symbol of how our democracy went horribly wrong just like O.J. Simpson turned into an icon of the failure of our criminal justice system.
Mr. Bush has suggested he will be dead before historians trying to understand his legacy "get it right." But he is wrong, again. The president is grasping at the concept that he has set in motion a process in the Middle East that will not be fulfilled until he has become dust. A tiny number of fervent believers like the president are still convinced the U.S. presence in Iraq will lead to democracy and stabilization when every scintilla of evidence indicates only escalating chaos and death. Even though he refuses to admit mistakes, the rest of this country and the wider global community have reached the unavoidable conclusion that America's invasion of Iraq was a monumental blunder. Historians examining that decision and its political and economic impact will have a similar judgment and looking at the facts through the focal length of decades will only amplify the ignorance of this president's choices.
The president insisted that he was been comforted by the fact that historians are still writing and examining the life of George Washington 231 years after the country was founded. If they are still debating his performance, Mr. Bush suggests, they will be discussing his administration for a long time, too. Oblivious to the context of history, our current president could not be expected to understand what an insult he had delivered to the man whose deeply held principles prompted him to both lead the founding of our nation as well as standing in the way of harm to fight for those beliefs. Mr. Bush has neither the intellect nor the curiosity to divine what our nation needs at this critical hour and because of that more and more of his political contemporaries will begin to shun him while historians during the next 100 years will simply wag their heads in great bafflement at his tenure.
The first bits of trace evidence regarding the coming isolation of Mr. Bush are already being discerned. Listen to the early GOP presidential contenders. There is not a soul among their number who talks about "continuing the great leadership of President Bush" or who suggests "we have to finish the job" started by this president. What precisely would they finish? Perhaps, they might go back and make an attempt to completely turn over Social Security funds to Wall Street or maybe they would try to rewrite health care laws to give even more money and power to pharmaceutical companies while at the same time surrendering additional national park lands to oil drilling while relaxing air quality standards so that we might all drive our SUVs in the accumulated haze. Fewer and fewer people in government and politics want to be associated with the man who has set these sadnesses rolling and after he is gone from office, Mr. Bush will become almost invisible. His phone won't be ringing and that's because almost everybody won't be calling. The most interesting entertainment of 2008 will be watching how the Republicans try to position Mr. Bush at their presidential nominating convention. He'll have to speak, of course, to say his farewell, as is tradition, but who will stand beside him and dare say "thank you?"
The ignominy, in fact, is already becoming apparent. As he begins to think about his life after the White House, the president and his increasingly small number of friends and supporters are looking at places to locate his library. Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where his wife Laura graduated, is the top choice. Unfortunately, professors, administrators, and staff at SMU don't like the idea of a Bush library on their campus. The board of regents received a letter from a large group of them who urged board members to refuse the president's request to build the library on campus because they did not want the university to appear as though it were sanctioning the wrongs of Mr. Bush's tenure. SMU has been laboring to shirk its image as an elitist institution that produces future Republicans and the letter written by the professors and others suggested that the greater goal of diversity would be hampered by having the Bush library stand sentinel on the campus.
Some of the slights being received by this president will be overt and others a tad subtle. The children of President Ford, who stood for hours shaking the hands of citizens come to pay respects to their father, were nowhere to be seen when Mr. Bush arrived for his perfunctory appearance beside the casket. This could hardly be interpreted as protocol. If they would have had any respect for Mr. Bush, the Ford children would have stayed to receive his personal condolences. Instead, they were absent during the entire seven seconds the president deigned to spend beside Mr. Ford's casket.
There is probably not much chance that Mr. Bush and O.J. Simpson will ever get to play golf together, although there would be much convenience and symmetry to the round. O.J. could continue his quest to find the real killer of his wife and her lover and the former president could look in the rough for weapons of mass destruction. Instead, however, Mr. Bush will spend the last part of his life wielding a chainsaw cutting down cedar trees in one of the box canyons of his ranch along the hardscrabble Balcones Escarpment. He will, of course, still be oblivious to all the wrongs he has done to his country and the global community. Forever, this man's heart and soul will be separated from the harm he has caused and the lives he has ruined and he will continue to sleep the sleep of a child.
As he fades, though, even George W. Bush is likely to ask himself the glaring question of how he went from being the most influential man on planet Earth to a cedar chopper with a nice house, no friends, and a few government paid guards watching over him in boredom. The answer, of course, should he ever get around to asking, will be "democracy." In spite of all he did to destroy our constitution simply to serve his political ends, our democracy will survive and move past Mr. Bush.
And he will finally arrive at the ignominy he has so rightly earned.