Bush Losing Ability to Persuade

President Bush is no longer getting the bounce in the polls that he once did after a major speech. No doubt Cheney and Karl Rove are worried that Bush's right wing agenda may no longer have traction. S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion says some Republicans are analyzing Bush's failing ability to communicate but he has a post that offers a more accurate take on the president's problem:

...Bush’s verbal communications skills leave a great deal to be desired. His down-home, sometimes sentence-fragment approach to speaking, taken against his record and results, serves as verification to some that failure to speak well reflects a failure to think well.

But more significant, both as cause and effect, is that Bush has so often spoken to mislead — to deny facts, to hide, bend, twist and shade truth — even to flat-out deceive. That is a very deliberate, purposeful, failure to communicate well. It’s a kind of failure most people, past some point of having been taken in, are unwilling to forget. It’s a kind of failure that results in lack of credibility, which is one of a president’s most valuable assets.

One of the reasons I would like Congress to slow down President Bush and hold him accountable is that it's very difficult to accomplish anything in the foreign policy field if the president has little or no credibility on the international stage and little interest in talking. But, if left unchecked, it's relatively easy for the Bush Administration to continue committing blunders; the recent hangings remind us of how fiasco after fiasco seem to follow in the wake of Bush's policies. Allowing Bush to dig a deeper hole without major corrections in his presidency is not a solution.

Worldwide, America's reputation has suffered and much of it can be traced to a growing distrust of our president and, more specifically, to Bush's many misleading and unsubstantiated claims and also his failure to uphold democratic principles despite some of his speeches praising democracy. Compounding Bush's lack of credibility is his seeming belief that military action can somehow restore his credibility. That is a delusion the United States can no longer afford.