The past few months since the State of the Union have been largely devoid of big Dubya news. Just a few years ago, any declaration from the POTUS would be all over the evening news and magazine covers. In fact, I'm pretty confident that in 2005 if Dubya scratched his ass it would be on the front cover of TIME that week. Lame-duck president doesn't even begin to describe the dropoff in media coverage; he's been completely invisible.
I didn't even know the guy was visiting Europe this week and I'd like to believe that I stay on top of the news much more than the average American. Curiously, there haven't been any protests by Europeans or any sort of hullabaloo. How does a guy go from invoking the ire of millions of Europeans to invoking....abject apathy?
My guess is a combination of many different factors. First, the current election for Bush's successor is defined by who can deviate from the course, rather than stay the course. Second, people are experiencing the comedown from the high that is Bush-bashing. Bush-bashing is so incredibly facile nowadays that people figure "Why bother anymore?". Third, when Bush says "stay the course", he really means it. Every speech he has delivered in the last three years devolves into four or five sound bites. To see what I mean, take a State of the Union speech from 2005 and compare it with the one he delivered in February this year. You'd be hard-pressed to see any differences not just thematically, but also syntactically.
This recent phenomenon is almost laughable, if Bush were not our president. Bush was recently on "Deal or no Deal" and ratings actually declined that week. That's just hilarious. That should be the true marker of disinterest in a president: decline in ratings of a popular tv show on NBC. Regardless, it speaks to the indifference of people towards a man who could do no wrong during the first years of his second term.
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