The Irrelevance of George W. Bush

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

President Bush has been rather irrelevant for the better part of the last year. The country is over and done with him and IMHO he will go down as the worst president in American history. Bush and Nero have much in common. They both fiddled as their empires went down. President Bush could have cut spending, he could have avoided launching a useless war, he could have run roughshod over Wall Street so risky mortgages weren't bundled into investment vehicles and sold to investors backed by nonexistent insurance. But he did not. Here we are, and will be paying for his feckless leadership.

It struck me this week, watching President-elect Obama take ownership of the economy, exactly how irrelevant President Bush has become. Totally. The American public and Wall Street titans are much more concerned with what President-elect Obama has already done than what President Bush is doing. Obama has assembled an economic team that includes bailout-seasoned Tim Geithner as treasury secretary and Larry Summers, who actually managed the Treasury Department when the federal budget was producing a surplus—seems eons ago, but it was only eight years.

Listening to radio coverage of the Mumbai terrorist takeover on Thanksgiving, yes, President Bush's reaction was mentioned first, but President-elect Obama's reaction was mentioned second. Obama's response seemed so much more articulate, reassuring and, well, grown-up. Yes, the grown-ups are coming back to Washington, D.C. We've really been missing them since they lost control eight years ago.

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