A Little Help from my Friends

This NY Times article asks the question, Bush-Watchers Wonder How He Copes With Stress:

President Bush marched into his year-end news conference last week with the usual zip in his step. As always, he professed little worry about his legacy or the polls. As always, he said the United States would win in Iraq. The nation might despair, but not Mr. Bush; his presidential armor seemed firmly intact.

Yet a longtime friend of Mr. Bush’s recently spotted a tiny crack in that armor. “He looked tired, for the first time, which I hadn’t seen before,” this friend said.

Mr. Bush has never been one for introspection, in public or in private. But the questions of how the president is coping, and whether his public pronouncements match what he feels as he searches for a new strategy in Iraq, have been much on the minds of Bush-watchers these days.

Can the president really believe, as he said on Wednesday, that “victory in Iraq is achievable,” when a bipartisan commission led by his own father’s secretary of state calls the situation there “grave and deteriorating?” Is he truly content to ignore public opinion and let “the long march of history,” as he calls it, pass judgment on him after he is gone? Does he lie awake at night, as President Lyndon B. Johnson did during the Vietnam War, fretting over his decisions?

Gee, I too have wondered how he's coping with being himself? But my thoughts turn in a different direction:

Tags: Bush, Politics