The Mumbai, India, Terrorist Attacks Remind Us That Bush Is Still in Charge

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

While Barack Obama has taken pains to say that we have only one president at a time, his rolling pronouncements about the economy have prompted some commentators to wonder whether we might have two. But the terrorist attacks in India starkly remind us that while George W. Bush may be forgotten, he's not yet gone—we do indeed have only one president right now, and it ain't Barack Obama. (Bonnie's assertion of his irrelevance notwithstanding.)

Obama can make economic pronouncements and will next week introduce his national security team, but it's still Bush who calls the shots on U.S. response to the incident. If you have any doubts about a lame duck president's power, recall George H. W. Bush committing U.S. troops to Somalia in December 1992, a mission that would have huge repercussions months later in the Clinton administration.

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