Limiting the Damage - New York Times
The New York Times

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November 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Limiting the Damage
By
PAUL KRUGMAN

President Bush isn't on the ballot tomorrow. But this election is,
nonetheless, all about him. The question is whether voters will pry his
fingers loose
from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he
can inflict in his two remaining years in office.

There are still some people urging Mr. Bush to change course. For example, a
scathing editorial published today by The Military Times, which calls on Mr.
Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld, declares that "this is not about the midterm
elections." But the editorial's authors surely know better than that. Mr.
Bush
won't fire Mr. Rumsfeld; he won't change strategy in Iraq; he won't change
course at all, unless Congress forces him to.

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush's character.
To put it bluntly, he's an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a
mistake,
any mistake, would undermine his manhood - and who therefore lives in a
dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his
officials
are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself "pleased with
the progress we're making" in Iraq.

In other words, he's the sort of man who should never have been put in a
position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power,
free
from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was,
alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the
news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only
part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by
rampant
cronyism - almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about,
from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, has been FEMAfied - may come to be seen as an equally
serious blow to America's future.

And it should be a matter of intense national shame that Mr. Bush has
quietly abandoned his fine promises to New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf
Coast.

The public, which rallied around Mr. Bush after 9/11 and was still prepared
to give him the benefit of the doubt two years ago, seems to have figured
most
of this out. It's too late to vote Mr. Bush out of office, but most
Americans seem prepared to punish Mr. Bush's party for his personal
failings. This
is in spite of a vicious campaign in which Mr. Bush has gone further than
any previous president - even Richard Nixon - in attacking the patriotism of
anyone who criticizes him or his policies.

That said, it's still possible that the Republicans will hold on to both
houses of Congress. The feeding frenzy over John Kerry's botched joke showed
that
many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle.
And if you think the timing of the Saddam verdict was coincidental, I've got
a terrorist plot against the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

Moreover, the potential for vote suppression and/or outright electoral fraud
remains substantial. And it will be very hard for the Democrats to take the
Senate for the very simple reason that only one-third of Senate seats are on
this ballot.

What if the Democrats do win? That doesn't guarantee a change in policy.

The Constitution says that Congress and the White House are co-equal
branches of government, but Mr. Bush and his people aren't big on
constitutional niceties.
Even with a docile Republican majority controlling Congress, Mr. Bush has
been in the habit of declaring that he has the right to disobey the law he
has
just signed, whether it's a law prohibiting torture or a law requiring that
he hire qualified people to run FEMA.

Just imagine, then, what he'll do if faced with demands for information
from, say, Congressional Democrats investigating war profiteering, which
seems to
have been rampant. Actually, we don't have to imagine: a White House
strategist has already told Time magazine that the administration plans a
"cataclysmic
fight to the death" if Democrats in Congress try to exercise their right to
issue subpoenas - which is one heck of a metaphor, given Mr. Bush's history
of getting American service members trapped in cataclysmic fights where the
deaths are anything but metaphors.

But here's the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to
ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush's ability to make
deadly
mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That's why many
Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends
tomorrow.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.