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Meanwhile, back at the White House … George W. Bush is in danger of becoming a forgotten President.
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is consuming most of the political oxygen, and what's left is taken up by Republican nominee John McCain's efforts to define his candidacy.
All presidents in the final year of a final mandate are lame ducks. But Mr. Bush is experiencing something unheard of for a U.S. president. He's being ignored.
Did you know, for example, that Mr. Bush will be visiting Russia this week to meet with outgoing President Vladimir Putin? Meetings between U.S. and Russian leaders used to be a big deal and the agenda for this one is important: disputes over missile defence and trade, for starters.
U.S. President George W. Bush gestures as he arrives on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington March 28. (Jim Young/Reuters)
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Yet The Wall Street Journal consigned the announcement to page 11 and The Washington Post put in on page 5, while The New York Times figured it was good enough for page 15.
The U.S. economy teeters on the brink of recession, threatened by falling home prices and worthless mortgages; even Wall Street has lost confidence in Wall Street.
What is the President doing to avert the crisis? Who cares? Economically, what really matters is what Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is doing. Politically, what matters is what Mr. McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say they would be doing if they were in charge.
“There is very little that he will be able to do in his last year,” observes Larry Berman, a political scientist who specializes in presidential politics at University of California, Davis. “It's legacy-shaping, rather than agenda-building.”
The problem is that Mr. Bush's legacy is unambiguously dismal. He is leaving the economy in worse shape than he found it, with an extra $4-trillion added to the national debt for good measure.
He presided over a vast expansion, and abuse, of the powers of his office. The legacy of Guantanamo, torture and wiretaps will not soon be forgotten.
The war on terror has had few tangible successes and many apparent failures. And elsewhere in foreign policy, the record has been bleak. To take just one example: when Mr. Bush first met Mr. Putin, Mr. Bush declared that he had looked the Russian President in the eye, “was able to get a sense of his soul,” and found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Seven years later, Russia is more powerful, more aggressive and considerably less friendly toward the United States.
Because Mr. Bush is held in such low regard by Congress and the American people – his popular approval rating is currently one of the worst ever recorded for a president in office – he is even more constrained than other lame duck presidents.
“He has neither much leverage, nor much vision,” concludes Murray Weidenbaum, who was the first chairman of Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and is now honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center, a public-policy institute at Washington University in St. Louis.
While Mr. Weidenbaum credits Mr. Bush with making some astute appointments in Treasury, Defence and the White House in his second term, he agrees that Mr. Bush has become largely irrelevant.
“Just look at the campaign,” he observes. “All through the primaries the Republican candidates tended to ignore Bush. They paid much more attention to Ronald Reagan. Even the Democrats seem to have lost interest in attacking Bush.”
Bill Clinton, despite the embarrassment of impeachment, had sufficient political capital in his final year to come within a hair's breadth of negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Mr. Reagan, though badly damaged by the Iran-Contra affair, continued in his final year to smooth the path for a peaceful end to the Cold War.
But Mr. Bush has little on his agenda beyond a slender hope that his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, might somehow broker an agreement leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.
And then, first and finally, there is Iraq. Prof. Berman predicts that “in 10 or 15 years, when all of the information is out on the decision to go to war, and all the intelligence is available, I think that President Bush will not fare well.” Some would consider that a scholarly understatement.
Mr. Bush, it has been said, compares himself to Harry Truman, a president who left office dogged by an unpopular war and low public approval, but who is today viewed as one the 20th century's finest presidents.
It is possible that posterity will be equally kind to Mr. Bush. But if you're going to compare yourself to Mr. Truman, it helps to have your own equivalent of the Marshall Plan, the containment policy against Russia, the formation of NATO, the defence of South Korea and desegregation of the armed forces on your résumé. What in the Bush legacy even comes close?
The Bush presidency is not utterly devoid of accomplishments. Domestically, the No Child Left Behind initiative put serious money and effort into improving the nation's schools, and there are early indications that the initiative is delivering results.
And before Mr. Bush meets Mr. Putin, he will be attending a NATO summit in Bucharest. There are sharp divisions within NATO over whether to admit Ukraine and Georgia to the alliance despite strong Russian protests. But NATO has successfully added several Warsaw Pact countries to its roster under Mr. Bush's watch, and has become militarily and diplomatically more active, for which the U.S. President can take some of the credit.
And if Mr. McCain beats the odds and wins in November, giving the Republicans 12 straight years in the White House, Mr. Bush's defenders will rightly insist that he deserves praise for helping make that victory possible.
Still, it's a thin gruel after more than seven years in office, most of that time with a Republican majority in Congress. It is why Mr. Bush, rather than shaping his legacy, is forced to watch from the sidelines while others render their verdicts. And they are not kind.
