Bush's Legacy: More Than Duct Tape Needed

The speech President George W. Bush delivered in New Orleans Thursday evening had the phony ring of a second-term president driven by a single goal: To rebuild what is left of his tattered legacy.

The president still contends he is a “compassionate conservative”, yet conservatives in his own party will find little joy in his huge spending proposals for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. In that sense, his speech could just as well have been made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson. No legacy there.

Maybe the “compassionate” part will be about race, which he mentioned briefly as the fault of slavery. But for five years the Bush administration has contorted itself to avoid even using the word. Save for his efforts to bring more African Americans into the Republican Party, the president has done nothing — zero, zippo — to stimulate an urgently needed national conversation about race. No legacy there.