Legacy Time

Typically a President would spend his last year touting his accomplishments and trying to cement some big ideas that he could ride into posterity. The Incredible Shrinking President we have now has no accomplishments to speak of and no new ideas to highlight. So he'll spend what is probably his last big moment in the national spotlight serving up reheated leftovers.

In a bow to political reality, President Bush's final State of the Union speech will skip bold proposals in favor of ones the country has heard before, a modest approach for a White House that prides itself on big ideas.

Bush's strategy reflects what he is up against: little time left in office, confrontational relations with a Democratic Congress and a diminishing role on the national stage. White House aides say there is not much point in unveiling grand ideas sure to go nowhere.

So don't expect anything Monday on the scale of overhauling Social Security or immigration policy, two earlier initiatives that died on Capitol Hill.

Dana Perino actually tried to spin this as a consequence of the Democratic "do-nothing Congress" and not the fact that Bush is a gambler down to his last two chips, dealt a 12 against an ace.

"I predict that after hearing the president's speech Monday night, Americans will be more convinced than ever that it's time for a change," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Hear hear to that. The Bush legacy is a pathetic stew of bad ideas and catastrophic outcomes.



Heck, even Peggy Noonan understands that Bush destroyed the Republican Party.

But this week, the most fitting and hilarious parable, the most apt description of the last seven years of Bush governance, came in the form of the revelation of the meaning of one of his favorite paintings:

But as governor, Bush wasn’t excited about his carpet; he was excited about a painting: “A Charge to Keep.” In 1995, he issued a memo to his Texas staff, describing the painting, by W.H.D. Koerner in 1916, which he kept on his office wall [...]

When one looks at the painting, you see a man on horseback — who actually looks a little like Bush — apparently leading a group of missionaries. It worked for Bush on a couple of levels: the title comes from one of the president’s favorite Methodist hymns, the man in the picture looks like him, and he related to the missionary work depicted in the painting [...]

In his new book, “The Bush Tragedy,” Jacob Weisberg explains:

"[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: 'Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.'"

Horse thief. Lynch mob evader.

Maybe he can work that into Monday's address.