Wipe that smile offa yore face

Peggy Noonan wishes that Bush wouldn't be so chipper:

As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president's seemingly effortless high spirits. He's in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president's since polling began. He's in a good mood. Discuss.

Is it defiance? Denial? Is it that he's right and you're wrong, which is your problem? Is he faking a certain steely good cheer to show his foes from Washington to Baghdad that the American president is neither beaten nor bowed? Fair enough: Presidents can't sit around and moan. But it doesn't look like an act. People would feel better to know his lack of success sometimes gets to him. It gets to them.

His stock answer is that of course he feels the sadness of the families who've lost someone in Iraq. And of course he must. Beyond that his good humor seems to me disorienting, and strange.

I think President Bush is a prideful man. An extremely prideful man. It explains a lot about why we have failed so badly in Iraq, in that to have admitted at any point that he was wrong about the strategy or the people he picked to advise and implement it would have been to have admitted error. Which he cannot do. What Bush is going to do -- is doing, has done -- is run the Republican Party into the ground, spectacularly. Far worse, of course, is what he has done to the country and to the military with this Iraq fiasco. But I'm thinking today about the politics of all this, and wondering where on earth the Republicans still sticking by him in Washington think this is going to end up. Things aren't going to get a bit better in Iraq by September. They're just buying time, hoping something will turn up, same as he is.

Noonan:

Americans hire presidents and fire them. They're not as sweet about it as they used to be. This is not because they have grown cynical, but because they are disappointed, by both teams and both sides. Some part of them thinks no matter who is president he will not protect them from forces at work in the world. Some part of them fears that when history looks back on this moment, on the past few presidents and the next few, it will say: Those men were not big enough for the era.

But this is a democracy. You vote, you do the best you can with the choices presented, and you show the appropriate opposition to the guy who seems most likely to bring trouble. (I think that is one reason for the polarity and division of politics now. No one knows in his gut that the guy he supports will do any good. But at least you can oppose with enthusiasm and passion the guy you feel in your gut will cause more trouble than is needed! This is what happens when the pickings are slim: The greatest passion gets funneled into opposition.)

I found out last night that there's a good chance my brother-in-law who's about to deploy to Baghdad will be assigned to dismantle IEDs. What business a middle-aged man with a wife and three kids has creeping around that godforsaken country for a year dismantling bombs set by people who don't want us there, and who want to get about the business of killing each other for the greater glory of their own sect and tribe, I don't know. Not anymore. I don't expect the next president to be much good at extricating the US from Iraq without a hellacious mess. But I do expect the next president to cause less trouble than this piece of work we have now. Along those lines, I don't expect the next president to be a Republican.