Bush, Reality and Iraq

The real world is President Bush's Achilles' heel. He can't keep his distance from it forever.

Bob Herbert has been one of the better contributors to the New York Times editorial page in recent months and his commentary today on Bush VS Reality is no exception.

There undoubtedly were many reasons for Mr. Bush's lackluster effort [in the debate]. But I think there was one factor, above all, that undermined the president in last week's debate, and will continue to plague him throughout the campaign. And that was his problematic relationship with reality.

Herbert points out that Bush's detachment from reality is rapidly becoming his biggest political liability.

The political problem for Mr. Bush is that while he is offering a rosy picture of events in Iraq - perhaps because he believes it, or because he wants to bolster American morale - voters are increasingly seeing the bitter, tragic reality of those events. A president can stay out of step with reality only so long. Eventually there's a political price to pay. Lyndon Johnson's deceit with regard to Vietnam, for example, has never been forgiven.

The president likes to tell us that "freedom is winning" in Iraq, that democracy is on the march. But Americans are coming to realize that Iraq is, in fact, a country in agony, beset by bombings, firefights, kidnappings, beheadings and myriad other forms of mayhem. The president may think that freedom is winning, but television viewers in the U.S. could see images over the weekend of distraught Iraqis pulling the bodies of small children from smoking rubble - a tragic but perfect metaphor for a policy in ruins.

That same detachment from reality is becoming a problem when it come to the economy. People know when the economy is good and when it's not. All they have to do is look at their checkbooks or recognize they are working more hours for less pay, getting less from the health insurance they are paying more for. A majority now realize the tax cuts didn't give them much and in addition didn't produce the promised jobs. Yes Mr. Bush, reality sucks.