2 1/2 Years

The Washington Post has two articles about the inside doings of the Bush West Wing.

One is a fluffy blowjob by Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz about how Karl Rove is recovering from his year of screwing up (the Social Security debacle) and skating away from hard time for the Plame case, how ready he is to take on the November elections with his usual Soviet-style lies, propaganda, and character assassination, and how much can still be "acconplished" in the waning years of the Bush administration.

Beyond campaigns, Rove has put aides on notice that his focus is also Bush's presidential legacy. At a meeting of senior White House staffers this month, one official recalled, budget director Rob Portman suggested in the course of discussing some issues that time was limited. "We've only got so much time left," Portman said.

"Wait," Rove interrupted. "We've got a lot of time left. Jack Kennedy's whole presidency was 2 1/2 years."

Compare that to a piece by Peter Baker and Michael A. Fletcher on newly-installed Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. They paint a nice Norman Rockwell portrait (including the mention of a real Rockwell painting) of how everything's all smooth sailing now that everyone in the West Wing knows what they're doing and what needs to be done in a very short period of time.

He has added few personal touches to his office, but one is a 1916 Norman Rockwell painting of a boy jumping from a moving car onto a runaway train to try to save the day. He first borrowed the painting from the Corcoran Gallery of Art when he was budget director and the runaway train in his mind was the federal deficit. Now he is trying to regain control of a White House that had slipped off track.

"Looking back over the past two months, I'm pleased with the progress we've made," he said. But he noted, "We are keenly aware of having just 2 1/2 years left to cram in a lot of agenda."

For one thing, it sounds like Rove and Bolten have to come to some kind of agreement about Einstein's theory of special relativity and the passage of time.

For someone who claims to have an "encyclopedic" knowledge of history and politics, it's strange that Karl Rove doesn't understand that the legacy of the Kennedy administration -- which was actually closer to three years long -- wasn't sealed by what it did but by how it ended. (But somehow I get the feeling that if Karl Rove could seal George W. Bush's legacy in history in some way that didn't involve violation of federal law and murder, he'd do it.) It should also be noted that the Kennedy administration was beset with internal party squabbles, a loose-cannon vice president, had several setbacks in foreign policy, and brought the world to the edge of a nuclear holocaust over a dictator's harboring of WMD's. The difference, of course, is that JFK knew he had to deal with a recalcitrant House and Senate, leery allies, and a tabloid press that was more interested in gossip than in news. And when it came to handling the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Kennedy reached across the aisle and brought in his political opponents who had no fear of telling him things he didn't want to hear. (He also did it with grace, charm, and an eloquence of language that has yet to be equalled by any president since.)

Or, to paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen: I was around for the Kennedy administration. I remember the Kennedy administration. Dubya, you're no Kennedy administration.