President Bush Says His Long Goodbye

Tonight, George W. Bush will look into the cameras and deliver the last prime-time address of his presidency. The broadcast TV networks have agreed to give him up to 15 minutes, which was all he asked for.

It's about the length of time he was allowed for a video chat with his party's national convention in St. Paul in September.

As the days dwindle down for the 43rd president, the TV networks were not eager to give up lucrative prime time. And the White House may have been just as glad to keep it short.

For all practical purposes, the Bush presidency has been over for months. The man remains the head of state and the chief executive, but he has not been the leader of the nation for some time.

His pronouncements, and the positions of his administration, have been of only marginal interest since sometime halfway through last year. In tacit recognition, the president has offered little beyond the routine communications from his office.

President Bush has had nearly nothing to say about the war in Gaza, the natural gas crisis in Europe or the historic terrorist attack in Mumbai. In the struggle to haul the financial system back from the brink of collapse, he has been all but invisible -- ceding his authority to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and hoping for the best.

This week, when asked whether he had asked Congress for the second $350 billion chunk of the bailout money for the financial industry, he said he hadn't done so because no one had asked him to. He wanted President-elect Obama to ask him to do it. Shortly after the news conference, the desired word came from the Obama camp, and President Bush issued the request. There you have it.

The speech is part of a protracted farewell tour the president has marched through, from his last round of Christmas parties to his final Cabinet meeting. The serial sayonara included his last White House news conference, where he admitted a few mistakes in the realm of imagery and message. He also used the words "disappointed" or "disappointment" a dozen times. But there was a distinct absence of significant regret.

Mr. Bush depicted his presidency largely as a succession of events that happened to him. Among these were the recessions that began and ended his tenure, the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the purported rationale for the U.S. invasion of that country), and Hurricane Katrina.

Given his apparent conviction that he could not be held responsible for any of these bad things, the president could stand tall and say he had a "good, strong record" to defend. But his claims of success have largely been reduced to a single negative achievement: the avoidance of another 9/11-style attack.

Both he and Vice President Cheney have repeatedly pressed this claim. They tell us that only the vigilance and aggressiveness of this White House has kept another Sept. 11 from happening, and that we would all agree -- if certain information could only be shared. We are all to understand, of course, that such information remains classified.

This week's duel with reporters was the first such interchange at the White House since July 2008. The ever-more-reclusive president stood aside last year for John McCain and his party to have a shot at winning in November.

In the campaign season, the Grand Old Party no longer wanted its good ol' boy president because he had come to symbolize so much that the electorate no longer wanted: open-ended commitments to foreign wars and a lack of commensurate interest in domestic needs. And that was before the problems of the banking industry dragged the entire economy into recession or worse.

With his early pinnacles of popularity far behind him, the president's personal aw-shucks charm had long since cloyed. Yet as the days have dwindled down, the president and vice president have striven to alter his image, sitting for exit interviews with various TV personalities. The tone has been wistful at times, combative at others.

When Jim Lehrer of PBS asked Mr. Cheney if it troubled him at all "to be leaving office next week with the overwhelming disapproval of a majority of the people as measured by the polls?" Mr. Cheney shot back: "I don't buy that." The vice president said he had just returned from a naval base where he had visited with a group of Navy SEALS who were quite supportive of the administration.

We can never foresee the final judgment of history on any question. It is always possible that future events will make the current administration look good in retrospect. But the odds are far greater that years hence we will reflect on this final display of Bush-Cheney assurance and certitude with disbelief, just as we do now.