BuzzFlash presents P.M. Carpenter

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The Embarrassment President

by P.M. Carpenter

Tony Blankley appeared on MSNBC's Hardball the other night, looking a bit ashen. As a panel member discussing the president's grave and gathering problems, the former Newt Gingrich evangelist and current Reverend Moon spokesman volunteered that even Republican support for George W is beginning to slip. This is bad, in his view. I'd like to relate Mr. Blankley's complete personal take on W's falling numbers, but, it being Hardball, Chris Mouthews was there to interrupt and talk over the guest. So I can't relate much with certainty.

Yet I have little doubt that Blankley and fellow conservatives would be in private agreement in identifying specific causes of W's decline and the relative harm each is doing. There's Iraq, of course, probably this nation's greatest foreign policy blunder ever. When you factor in the blunder's increasingly apparent intentionality, mere blundering then transmogrifies into the criminal. That sort of behavior doesn't make for gangbuster approval ratings, even among one's base.

But even that is just the tip of the political iceberg this White House first created, then rammed. There's also the colossal deficit Mr. Bush labored so hard to produce, something which the Democratic Party's finest wastrels could not have done a better job at. Principled conservatives are seething. There's the colossally clumsy way in which the White House mismanaged the National Guard story. There was the president's colossally bungled introduction of revamped immigration policy, a package with a little something to alienate nearly everyone. There were the colossal bombs of the State of the Union speech and "Meet the Press" appearance. And most recently there was the White House's backtracking on its colossally imbecilic promise of 2.6 million new jobs by year's end, preceded by numerous other colossally stupid promises of miraculous job growth.

Move over, Howard Dean. Piece by piece the Bush administration is self-cannibalizing, offering future administrations a detailed tutorial on political implosion. Each week brings another misstep, another miscalculation, another boneheaded move.

Yet there may be more in play than the sum of individual missteps and riddled credibility. There may also be a growing kind of gestalt thing happening at the White House in which the systematic correction of specific missteps will have little positive effect. What I suspect Tony Blankley was thinking during his Hardball appearance, and might have come close to uttering had the host permitted elaboration, is that for conservatives, quite simply, George W Bush is becoming an embarrassment.

Once that emotion takes root among the base, there isn't much a president can do in the way of lancing it. In fact, the more conscious steps Bush takes to overcome the embarrassment he's inflicted on himself and his party, the more self-conscious the process seems and the more obvious the embarrassment's original cause becomes. Again, I reference the National Guard fiasco.

The effect is political quicksand: The harder Bush struggles to free himself, the deeper he'll sink. The Tony Blankleys of the Republican Party likely are sinking into a daunting realization as well. They're stuck and they feel it. They had a winner who could do no wrong; now they have a guy who realistically cannot do anything right.

In addition, there's a growing and resentful feeling of guilt by association among hardcore conservatives. Democratic politicians and the docile press were long intimidated by a popular commander in chief shielded from attack by misinformed patriotism. For reasons well known, they now feel liberated from that political anaconda, liberated enough to denounce with seeming impunity the president's -- which is to say, the right's -- radical agenda. Once the right's top cheerleader became an embarrassment, its message began to suffer, too. The right is not amused, and it's starting to show in the polls.

Like an unsupervised child, George W Bush was unmindful of his limitations and surroundings. He got carried away at playtime. For three years there were no adults around willing to issue the inevitable warning: "Somebody's going to get hurt." Somebody did, and Tony Blankley knows who. It's all so embarrassing.