The change Bush believes in won’t be easily undone by his successor

IN Washington DC at the weekend, the Bush joke books piled high in the stores’ discount sections told their own story.

Lame ducks are to be pitied, not laughed at, it seems. The days when 7,000 gardaí, troops and secret service personnel had to be deployed in Co Clare to protect him are but memories. This presidency is over bar the bank bail-outs.

Instead, on the streets of America’s capital, in the bars, over coffee in Georgetown, the only topic of conversation is what’s being billed as the most important US election since Jack Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by 0.1% of the vote. And everyone is aware it could be just as close this November as it was in 1960.

Bush’s first election was even closer, of course. Born in controversy, his has certainly been a most surprising presidency. To be parochial for a second, when Bill Clinton left office it was assumed Ireland would fall off the radar once more. In fact, Bush dropped by our little island not once, not twice, but three times.

In the Middle East, too, expectations were confounded. Remember all those predictions about a Texan oilman being more friendly to Arab potentates? Above all, wasn’t this supposed to be a humbler administration — conservative, yes, but compassionate too, a balm for the wounds opened up by the Monica Lewinsky scandal?

On the contrary, like him or loathe him, George Bush has been in some ways a transformative figure. And those planes scything through the World Trade Centre were only partly to blame.

The widely ascribed failures of Bush’s two terms hardly require elaboration: WMD, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition flights, ‘Osama bin Forgotten’, anti-Americanism, Donald Rumsfeld — not to mention budget deficits and Katrina.

It’s not been all Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, though. Yes, the Bush Doctrine — anticipating threats and taking action before they fully develop — has become mainstream. Democratisation has been put nearer the heart of America’s mission in the world than ever before, too.

But the outgoing president’s dwindling number of acolytes can point to an intriguing US nuclear pact with India, a steady stream of bilateral trade agreements, a redoubled commitment to fight HIV/AIDS and an innovative aid programme for the developing world.

At home, too, it hasn’t been the do-nothing administration widely forecast back in 2001. In social policy, the Bush presidency has brought education reform and restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Bush’s two appointments have nudged the Supreme Court significantly to the right as well.

In finance, the US administration’s current scramble to contain the mortgage market turmoil has arguably done more to extend Washington’s control over Wall Street than anything since the Depression era.

Furthermore, the creation of the Homeland Security Department represents the biggest bureaucratic reorganisation that Washington had seen since the creation of the CIA two generations ago.

None of these legacies will be easily undone, limiting the scope for the ‘change’ both Barack Obama and John McCain are now promising. There will be no return to the status quo ante.

It is a cliché to say 9/11 “changed everything”. It certainly convinced Americans that al-Qaida is a threat rather than a nuisance. President Bush convinced them in turn that the US must apply military as well as civilian tools to confront terrorism.

But the more things change, the more things stay the same in another sense.

Strikingly, for all his activism, Bush bequeaths to his successor all the major international problems and preoccupations he inherited.

On Iraq, the situation when Bush came in was unstable and dangerous, but not critical. Then, for a time, affairs in Iraq became critical, verging on catastrophic. Now the situation is again unstable and dangerous, but not critical. Obviously, Iraq today is a very different kind of problem than it was eight years ago, one more pregnant with both promise and risk. But the US preoccupation with Iraq is not destined to end anytime soon.

It’s the same with Iran. Since 2001, this rogue nation has raced ahead with uranium enrichment, elevated an apocalyptic demagogue to its second-highest office, and expanded its regional influence. The UN has, however, imposed several sets of sanctions which are biting somewhat. The final showdown everyone expected never materialised.

With regard to North Korea, things have also come full circle. A tenuous denuclearisation agreement that was in place eight years ago broke down and has been resurrected. The same game of cat-and-mouse is still being played.

On the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Bush’s reluctant conclusion that the US must mediate an agreement all but guarantees that no future president will try to shirk responsibility for resolving the problem. If Bush couldn’t walk away, no one can. Even on global warming, the US is back where it was, committing itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though rhetorically rather than substantively. The clear lesson is that change is easier promised than delivered and new approaches will be hard to come by. The change lovers are almost bound to be disappointed.

For instance, despite the heat Iraq has generated in the presidential campaign, it’s doubtful that a President Obama would act much differently from President Bush or, for that matter, from a President McCain. Conditions will either allow a quick US drawdown or they won’t.

MEANWHILE, the public conversation has moved on to the economy and McCain’s two-point opinion poll lead of a week ago has been reversed. According to the average of national polls, Obama leads by 47% to McCain’s 45%, still not a comfortable margin.

No wonder the first national TV debate between the candidates will be watched with intense interest on Friday. The odds are on the younger man, but it’s worth recalling the debate between President Jimmy Carter and Governor Ronald Reagan. The incumbent tried to dismiss Reagan as an extremist who had opposed free healthcare. Unfortunately for him, the cameras panned to Reagan, chuckling: “There you go again.” In his closing statement, Reagan, with one line, devastated Carter by asking: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

The rest is history. The polls, previously close, broke in Reagan’s favour and he won by a landslide. The debate was certainly not the only factor at work — the Iran hostage crisis hobbled Carter, too — but it was a crucial turning point.

Television debates can be shallow; they can focus on irrelevant questions. But like them or not, they can have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, particularly in a race — such as the one we face today — where the polls are more or less even.

Am I going to call this election yet? One of the lessons of the past week’s calamitous events is that predictions are scarcely scientific. After all, who foresaw the dimensions of this economic mess? So the change you can believe in is my right to change my mind.