Wake Us When He's Gone

Forget what Historians of the Future will think of him. Accordingly to the right-of-center Economist, Bush can't even hold his head high at a family picnic:

The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”.

The essential problem is that George W. Bush is stupid, lazy, and incurious. Worse, according to his own speech writer, Bush surrounded himself with like-minded mirrors:

David Frum, who wrote speeches for Mr Bush during his first term, noted that “conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House”. The Bush cabinet was “solid and reliable”, but contained no “really high-powered brains”. Karen Hughes, one of his closest advisers, “rarely read books and distrusted people who did”. Ron Suskind, a journalist, has argued that Mr Bush created a “faith-based presidency” in which decisions, precisely because they were based on faith, could not be revised subsequently.

Almost everyone continues to speak in amazed tones about how a black American, or more precisely a mixed-race American, is about to be sworn in as President of the United States. More impressive to us is that that we have elected an intelligent American to become president.

As someone said during the campaign last summer, "What's Obama's secret? He's smart. He reads. He knows his sh*t." What a difference.