One month ago, President Bush may have expected to end his time in office highlighting the success of the surge in Iraq, a story of vindication.
But in the past two weeks, the U.S. economy has teetered at least twice.
Now, instead of an exit in which Iraq was a large part of the legacy conversation, Mr. Bush is confronted with a final 15 weeks full of questions about how much he is to blame for the economic crisis.
“If the economy doesn’t show any signs of turning around, that will trump the good news in Iraq,” said a senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill.
To top it off, a special prosecutor with free rein to investigate the administration was appointed last week.
Of all the bad days in the past two weeks, last Monday may have been the worst, drilling home the administration’s near powerlessness to influence lawmakers in its own party, the seriousness of the economic crisis, and the scenario of former and current senior White House officials being subpoenaed for testimony.
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It was bad enough that House Republicans rebuked the president by rejecting his economic rescue plan, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 778 points.
“The vote Monday was aimed at Bush,” said Paul Weyrich, a longtime conservative leader in Washington.
The White House spent last Monday in an all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort as the president and “everyone with a phone” called House Republican lawmakers who were undecided about the $700 billion rescue package.
But 133 of 199 House Republicans rejected the president’s entreaties and voted against the bill.
“The level of trust between members and the administration is at an all-time low, and nowhere was it more evident than during the push for this bailout,” a House Republican leadership aide said.
The Republican aide largely blamed Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. for much of the initial failure of the rescue plan.
“Members have a visceral hatred of Paulson and they universally blame him for the public relations disaster that resulted from his rollout of this bailout plan,” the aide said.
That same day, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey named a special prosecutor to investigate the administration’s firings of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006.
“With a special prosecutor, [Mr. Bush] may be hounded during his last days in office,” Mr. Weyrich said.
Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department chief spokesman, said he did not expect Nora R. Dannehy, the acting U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to abuse her position as special prosecutor, but the White House “can’t be thrilled about it.”
“As they limp toward the finish line, the last thing they need is another investigation,” Mr. Corallo said. “Any special prosecutor can do tremendous damage.”
Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department inspector general, said last week that his office was unable to find any prosecutable offenses committed by administration officials involved in U.S. attorney firings.
But, Mr. Fine said, the refusal of current and former top White House officials - former senior adviser Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, and current White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten - hindered him from getting the whole story.
Mrs. Dannehy has the authority to subpoena all three of those officials for testimony before a grand jury.
The president’s supporters, however, say that how he goes out of office is meaningless compared with how he is viewed through the long lens of history.
“I don’t think the president cares too much about going out on a ‘high note’ or not,” said Peter Wehner, the former head of the White House office of strategic initiatives. “What he cares about is if, with the passage of time, his decisions will be vindicated. He believes, and I believe, many of them will, including Iraq and including the passage of this emergency legislation.”
Mr. Bush has said that history will judge him more kindly than contemporary critics do.
Mr. Wehner even said the timing of the economic crisis, at the end of Mr. Bush’s term, was in a way fitting.
“The Bush presidency has been about big things from the outset. It seem to me this is, in a sense, a predictable way for it to end,” he said. “This credit crisis happened on his watch, but not because of his actions.”
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, who a year ago predicted “an ugly and unproductive end to the Bush presidency,” nonetheless credited the president for his leadership through the past two weeks.
“Bush has acted very responsibly on the financial meltdown by recognizing the need to act and giving his Treasury secretary freedom to act,” Mr. Mann said. “His actions will be viewed favorably by historians, even though he is so politically discredited that his influence with the public and members of Congress was almost nonexistent.”
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