614 days and counting: Doom and Gloom for the GOP and a Flatlined Presidency.

From Bloomberg report on May 14, 2007:

As President George W. Bush's term comes to an end, a columnist for a leading business news service wrote on Monday, Republicans see "doom and gloom."

"While the other major democracies have, or are about to have, new leaders, America is mired in a rudderless status quo," writes Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, who hosts the weekend news program Political Capital. "A new embarrassment or scandal – Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove – seems to surface daily; the only good news for the White House is that occasionally these stories overshadow the bad news coming out of Iraq."

As a consequence, Hunt writes, negativity exists among Republican leaders about the party's current state.

"Private conversations with Republicans throughout America reveal doom and gloom about a politically paralyzed presidency and party," he notes. "Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's job performance; that is Richard Nixon territory."

Hunt also sees paralysis looming in Bush's efforts to set national policy for one large reason – the Iraq War.
"While the president can veto most initiatives of congressional Democrats, his once-ambitious second-term dreams of overhauling Social Security and the tax system and dealing with America's health-care crisis have evaporated," he argues. "Accordingly, Bush will probably spend much of the next year and a half sparring with critics, including a growing number in his own party, over an Iraq war policy that few believe will succeed."

A year ago, William F. Buckley Jr., the father of contemporary American conservatism, lamented that even if Bush had ``invented the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't get him out of his (Iraq) jam.''

That won't change over the next 616 days.

(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News.)