Mr. Bush Should Reshuffle His Deck

Last week saw a rumble pass through Washington when some serious thinkers suggested that the president should get some new faces into his cabinet. The White House, filled with people who could have lost their access and positions of power, quickly laughed off the idea. Vice President Dick “Elmer Fudd” Cheney delivered a coup de grace on the talk shows yesterday saying there would be no shake up. Mr. Bush should reconsider.

The last year has shown the second Bush term to be out of gas. This is not just the opinion of a journal that has never supported his administration. This is the assessment of GOP hardline supporters. Ed Rollins, formerly of the Reagan White House, has said Congress needs to move beyond Mr. Bush. Tom Kean, Jr., son of New Jersey’s former governor, has started running an ad in his senatorial bid featuring John McCain rather than George “LBJ” Bush.

Yet, Mr. Bush (barring impeachment and conviction or medical disasters) will be president for another 1,037 days. That is a long time for any nation to have a figurehead, lame duck executive. For the world’s hyperpower, it is a catastrophe. Mr. Bush needs to do something to fix the perception that he is irrelevant before it becomes fact. He cannot sit and wait as he did during Hurricane Katrina.

The defining factor in his presidency is the war in Iraq, which he claims is part of the war on terror. In the last several months, the American public has come to believe that things in Iraq have worsened (this journal agrees, while the Busheviks do not). However, getting a government in place there and getting an army of Iraqis in the field could bring 40,000 US troops home by the end of the year. That would help. Of course, Mr. Bush could also announce the capture of Usama bin Laden, and then all bets are off.

Yet, he controls neither of those situations. What he does control is the agenda in Washington, and if he were to change some of the players in the cabinet and elsewhere, he would change the nature of the discussions in Washington and throughout the country. It wouldn’t last more than a month or so, but it would offer him the chance to control the agenda, and it would put him back on the offensive.

The Bush Presidency is on the verge of failure, and “Dubya” has the potential of being remembered as one of the worst (perhaps even the worst) president the nation has ever had. Three new faces is all it would take to look like the leader he thinks he is. Fortunately for him, there is no need to rush into this; the window of opportunity is still open and will remain so for several weeks yet. But he needs to act before Memorial Day because after that, the mid-term elections will take the oxygen out of the media room.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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