KEY POINTS:
Even when faced with his lowest approval ratings over the Iraq war, President George W. Bush had always pointed proudly to what he considered his crowning achievement - his stewardship of the economy.
But now, with oil prices near record highs, the mortgage market on the verge of
meltdown and the spectre of recession looming, Bush is seeing even that seemingly safe part of his frayed presidential legacy slipping away.
Bush is scrambling to halt the economic slide and calm turbulent world financial markets with an economic stimulus package of up to US$150 billion ($196 billion). But even if that does the job, Bush will have a hard time salvaging his place in history.
With one year left in office, he is bogged down in an unpopular foreign war, his domestic agenda is stalled by an opposition-led Congress and he is struggling for relevance as attention turns to the battle to choose his successor.
"The way things are now, his legacy looks grim," said Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, who predicts Bush will ultimately rank in the bottom 25 per cent of American presidents. "It's hard to imagine him making a significant comeback."
Mindful of his low poll ratings, the Republican Bush often likens himself to Harry S. Truman, an unpopular Democratic president now admired for his handling of the Korean conflict and Cold War. Bush has insisted he too will be vindicated. But most political analysts reject such comparisons, saying history's judgment of Bush is likely to be closer to presidents considered more mediocre, such as Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.
This wasn't the way it was supposed to be when Bush took office in 2001. His supporters touted him as the first "MBA president" - Bush holds a masters of business administration from Harvard University - who would run the executive branch like a corporate chief executive and manage the economy like a business.
But Bush's Democratic critics contend that billions of dollars have been wasted on the nearly five-year Iraq war and the large tax cuts he engineered have mostly helped the rich while doing little to lift the poor.
He now faces the threat of the second recession on his watch, while the once-mighty US dollar languishes globally.
Like many presidents before him, Bush has recently shifted more of his focus to world affairs in the twilight of his presidency, as he sees his domestic political clout dwindling.
Bush is pushing Israel and the Palestinians to forge a peace treaty by the end of his term, but people on both sides are sceptical, seeing it as too little, too late by a president who had been mostly disengaged from Middle East diplomacy.
In an interview with journalists accompanying him on his trip last week, Bush acknowledged that he would have "a lot of work to try to instil confidence" about his efforts.
Even in the face of security gains in Iraq that have lowered the volume of criticism at home, the war appears to have done lasting damage to US credibility abroad that many analysts say will take years to repair. His ability to rally international support against Iran has been diminished by a US intelligence report that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, contradicting his earlier assertions that it was actively pursuing a bomb.
Bush's seeming powerlessness to temper high oil prices was on display during his visits last week to oil-producing Gulf allies, where he appealed for relief on tight supplies but apparently came away with no concrete promises.
Even Bush's fellow Republicans seeking their party's 2008 presidential nomination seem to be running from his legacy at times. Candidate Mike Huckabee wrote an article late last year accusing the Bush Administration of having an "arrogant bunker mentality" on the world stage.
In the meantime, many world leaders are looking beyond Bush to the next person who will wield clout in the White House, which does not bode well for him to score any major foreign policy achievements in his waning months in office.
- REUTERS
