President Falls Down Tiny Hole in WH Floorboards; Secret Service Alerted

Anyone remember the President? He's certainly not having that easy a time getting his second-term agenda passed. His visibility events (some might say pseudo-events) on Social Security as generating about enough energy to keep a light bulb going for 15 minutes (low wattage). And he doesn't even get a courtesy call when the White House is evacuated.

Maybe that's because he has lost his proverbial mojo:

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

Well, what do you expect when you take a 51% "man-date" a govern like it's a 100% Kim Jong Il landslide?

"He has really burned up whatever mandate he had from that last election," said Leon E. Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during President Bill Clinton's second term. "You can't slam-dunk issues in Washington. You can't just say, 'This is what I want done' and by mandate get it done. It's a lesson everybody has to learn, and sometimes you learn it the hard way."

It's the word "learn" I disagree with in that soundbite. Because that's really not the modus operandi of this White House. There are no mistakes to learn from. There are no opposing viewpoints to learn about. There are no compromises to learn and implement. There is only the One True Way of tax-the-poor, spend-the-surplus, corporate theo-conservative kleptocracy. And even Republicans are on to this:

"There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly," said an influential Republican member of Congress. "The term I hear most often is 'tin ear,' " especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. "We could not have a worse message at a worse time."

If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck, and a lame one to boot. What should scare everyone in this country is the knowledge that the only way out of this morass is another rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums. However, you'd need an Army to fight that, which is frankly in negligible supply. Not that any of the war hawks or conservative pundits or 101st Fighting Keyboarders are rushing to the recruiting offices (nor are they urging any of their fellow citizens to do so; it's the first-ever war without sacrifice).

But I'll wager that this Incredible Shrinking President will continue to blather away about cultures of life and presonal accounts, thinking that everything's hunky-dory since nobody would dare tell him anything's wrong. When they secretly replace the desk in the Oval Office with a set of Barbie furniture, he won't notice. When his toothbrush becomes a toothpick with a couple whiskers stapled on the front, he'll suspect nothing. When he's able to ride around in Dick Cheney's bad ticker like Martin Short in "Innerspace," I'm sure he'll just think it's some newfangled bike path. Surely the most powerful man in the free world can assemble enough advisers and handlers to shield him from the fact that he's only 16 inches high.

He'd just better damn well hope the folks at Diebold can hold off a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. Because then those twilight years will be summed up in two words: subpoena power.