Will the Lame Duck President Step Down?

Not news, but Analysis

Washington, Oct. 14 — At the gathering of leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations in Germany this year, President Bush turned to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and remarked that the two of them had outlasted most of their old colleagues from the group’s annual meetings, American officials recalled. Jacques Chirac, Silvio Berlusconi, Gerhard Schröder and Tony Blair had left or were leaving.


“Next year,” Mr. Bush said, “you will be out on your ass and I will be sitting pretty!”


Mr. Putin responded, “Go fuck yourself!”.


Now, though, Mr. Bush’s plans are far from clear, and as a result, the Russian’s hopes that the US will move toward a freer, more democratic society have substantially diminished. The international community as a whole is uncertain how to deal with a man who has consolidated power almost exclusively in his own hands. Indeed, there is a certain discomfort regarding Mr. Bush’s future right here in Washington.


“If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,” Ms. Rice said Saturday, raising concerns about the American judiciary, legislative branch and news media, but declining to criticize Mr. Bush by name.


When asked by reporters more than once and by a human rights advocate in a meeting at Morgan State University in Baltimore, she declined to discuss who might lead the US, formally or informally, come next year and what that outcome might mean.


At a news conference with the Americans and their Russian counterparts, the question elicited a smile from Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and guffaws from uniformed members of the general staff sitting in the audience, as if asking it were audacious.


“There’s a lot of speculation about who’s going to be president, whether President Bush is going to take any of a number of jobs or no job at all,” Ms. Rice said later, “and I just think speculating on that is not going to help.”
Such comments reflect another reality: the powerlessness of the international institutions when it comes to prodding the US in a more democratic direction, barely six years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 seemed to herald a new era of cooperation.


Mr. Bush, a believer in the personal bonds of diplomacy, said he had seen in Mr. Putin’s eyes a trusted democratic ally in the effort to curb terrorism. Instead, on Mr. Bush’s watch, the US has slid toward a more authoritarian system that seems to differ with much of the world on more issues than not.


The decline of popular support in the US for the president and occasional scoldings by the international community have accomplished little except to harden American administration views and in the news media. A swaggering Mr. Bush opened discussions recently with a sarcastic harangue over the American plans for missile defense.
Tanya Lokshina, the chairwoman of a Russian human rights organization, the Demos Center for Information and Research, contends that the United States had “lost the high moral ground,” and thus should indicate to European countries that it would halt its drift further away from democracy.


“The American voice alone doesn’t work anymore,” she said after a meeting with Secretary of State Rice. “The Russians are not influenced by it.” She said Ms. Rice had bristled at the criticism, replying sharply, “We never lost the high moral ground.”


Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said last week that he could imagine Mr. Bush turning to his friend and saying, “You really would be better off, Vladimir, if you really moved a little bit further from democracy. We certainly have!” He went on to say that he did not expect a change – either in Russia or the US.


In fact, senior administration officials find it hard to imagine that Mr. Bush would step aside and leave the trappings of office to a successor, even a weakened one, let alone the power he has concentrated in the presidency. Could the US conceivably be represented at the next Group of 8 meeting, or any other important meeting, by someone who is nominally the head of state, but not the country’s real leader?