Trying Times

Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.

Usually, anniversaries are occasions for celebration. And the fifth is a milestone.

For those who are responsible for getting America ensnared in the mess in Iraq, it's more of a millstone than a milestone.

Some of the people who are responsible are no longer in power (i.e., Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell). Others -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice -- are still in office.

Bush gets regular reminders of what the public thinks of the Iraq War. They're called approval ratings. And Bush's approval ratings have tumbled about 40 points since the war began. That's roughly equivalent to the drop that Lyndon Johnson faced at a comparable point in the Vietnam conflict.

Oddly, it appears Bush was the only one who seems to have been saying much about the war today. Attention seemed to be focusing on Barack Obama's speech about race and Hillary Clinton's insistence that Michigan and Florida should be represented at the Democratic convention.

And people who weren't paying attention to Obama and Clinton were obsessing over Eliot Spitzer's call girl and the recently discovered video tape of her "Girls Gone Wild" auditions from 2003, when she was 18.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who, as the Republican nominee, will have to run with Bush's record and persuade Americans to support four more years of a Republican-controlled White House, had this to say: "America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism. ... Important political gains have also been made, but far more must be done in coming months to cement the gains made in huge cost in American blood and treasure."

Approval ratings for Bush and Congress are quite low. Gallup says Bush is at 32% , while Congress' approval rating is 21%.

But neither figure should be surprising, and the Iraq War isn't solely to blame for it.

Also according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who now believe the U.S. economy is in a recession is 76%. That's more than twice the number who felt that way in October.

It's hard to argue the point. In October, the consumer wasn't being told that each day brought a new record high in the price of gasoline. And record gas prices mean higher costs for transporting everything. That means everything you buy costs more.

You don't have to be an economics major to figure that out.

This belief about the economy was already prevalent when Bush paid a visit to the Economic Club of New York last week. If you watched his speech -- or clips of it on the evening news -- and kept one eye on the front page of the daily newspaper, you had to wonder something.

Why was that man smiling?

"That idiotic 'what me worry?' look just never leaves the man's visage," writes Robert Scheer for Creators Syndicate. "Once again, there was our president, presiding over disasters, in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and reality."

Gail Collins wrote, in the New York Times, that listening to Bush's speech to the Economic Club "brought back many memories. Unfortunately, they were about his speech right after Hurricane Katrina, the one when he said: 'America will be a stronger place for it.'"

It's not encouraging when a presidential speech to the Economic Club of New York brings back memories of the greatest natural disaster in American history and the nation's mostly anemic emergency response to it.

So why was Bush smiling? Maybe because he realizes these won't be his problems anymore in about 10 months.

Or maybe there's a little more to it than that.

"Failure suits him," says Scheer. "It is a stance he learned to wear well while presiding over one failed Texas business deal after another, and it served him splendidly as he claimed the title of president of the United States after losing the popular, and maybe even the electoral, vote. It carried him through the most ignominious chapter of U.S. foreign policy, from the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to his unprecedented defense of torture by a U.S. president."

Collins puts it this way.

"The country that elected George Bush -- sort of -- because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance. Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend."

Actually, he's probably ready to kick back and start his retirement.

"Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood," says Maureen Dowd, also in the New York Times.

"The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called 'The Most Happy Fella.'"

The ghosts of Herbert Hoover and the Depression are hovering over the campaign of 2008, writes Amity Shlaes in Bloomberg.

"[T]he 1930s have plenty to tell us, yes," says Shlaes. "But the real challenge isn't deciding who resembles Hoover. The challenge is for both parties to figure out how to avoid a whole era of mistakes."

And the challenge for voters is to find who has the answers we need before today's problems become a decade's worth of financial handicaps.

Or maybe we'd be better off with Alfred E. Neuman at the controls.