SeattlePost-Intelligencer: Nation and World Pay Enormous Price for Bush's Inadequacies

"It is interesting to speculate on what Americans look for in a national leader. David Gergen, who served as adviser to four U.S. presidents, suggests the nation is attracted to men who [walk like] John Wayne, talk like Gary Cooper and look like Tom Cruise on a flight deck. This may be, in fact, the style Bush has tried to emulate for the past three-plus years, but it is hardly the type of leader Americans have elected as president for the past seven decades. Even the late Ronald Reagan, who probably came closest to the Gergen profile (with the exception of looking like Tom Cruise), rejected the macho image that many ascribed to him; he expressed the hope that he would be remembered "as someone who appealed to [our] greatest hopes, not our worst fears, to [our] confidence rather than [our] doubts."
American presidents, at least in my lifetime, have been people who are remembered and valued far less for how they walked, talked and looked than for the keenness of their grasp of national problems and world issues, for the regard in which they were held by other world leaders whom they had to confront and ultimately collaborate in resolving international tensions and conflicts, and for the soundness of their judgments when it came to making tough decisions. These are the very virtues in which Bush is in such pitifully short supply, and both America and the world are paying an enormous price for his inadequacies.
Strangely and to a frightening degree, Bush's fiercest defenders describe him not in the language we've come to associate with good national leadership in a democratic society but in terms reserved for those who think they rule by divine right. Columnist Charles Krauthammer thinks Bush's "astonishing performance" since 9/11 has left the world reeling and Democrats seething. The pretender has not just seized the throne, he was acting like a king.
Nay, an emperor?
The problem, of course, is that we don't anoint kings in America (in spite of what the Supreme Court did in the 2000 elections). And emperors have a rather long and untidy history of creating disasters for themselves, while bringing their nations crashing down around their ears.
The fact that we are in a war inevitably invites comparisons between Bush and other U.S. presidents who have led the nation in times of crisis or who brought to the presidency insights and experiences shaped by difficult moments or decisions. In Bush's case, it is instructive to weigh him as a leader with two of his predecessors, both Republicans.
As the anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated this month, the story was reported that Dwight Eisenhower carried in his wallet a note that he wrote the night before the invasion. He wrote it in case the Allied landing failed. The note read: "If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
Reagan also showed the stature of a leader in his address to the nation in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal when some of his underlings (one of whom now has a prominent post in Bush's National Security Council) were caught funneling funds from illegal Iranian arms sales to the right wing in Nicaragua. "A few months ago," stated Reagan, "I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
Two qualities of leadership emerge, therefore, which Bush apparently is incapable of demonstrating. Unlike Ike, Bush cannot bring himself to take responsibility for things that go wrong on his watch. And, unlike Reagan, Bush has failed to acknowledge that he lied to the nation about his reasons for going to war in Iraq. These are enormous disqualifiers for any serious claim to leadership on the part of George W. Bush."