It may not be that bad. There's a sporting chance that the next four years will see a battle for George Bush's soul between Dick Cheney, hardest of the hard men, and the White House's last liberal, Laura Bush. Well, "liberal" may be stretching it a bit, although, like her mother-in-law, Laura is known to be sympathetic to abortion rights. Barbara Bush, the old silver fox, was discreet about it, but Laura used the bully platform of NBC-TV's Today Show back in 2001 to assert that the Roe v Wade supreme court decision should not be touched. Even when the thought police got to her this summer and made her tell a Washington Times interviewer that she supported her husband's position, she still dug her heels in, saying that instead of being banned, abortion should be rare.
Laura also likes foreign aid, and those bits of the UN like Unicef and the environmental programme that normally get Bush loyalists foaming at the mouth. She has made a lasting friend of Angela King, the Jamaican diplomat who became the UN's assistant secretary-general and head of women's issues. They got to know each other when Laura joined the international women's day events at the UN and bonded over the campaign for the rights of Afghan women. Laura is also very loyal to her old Texas friends, some of whom remain Democrat, at least nominally. They confide that the former librarian and book addict has been reading about Nancy Reagan's success in persuading her husband to spend his second term making peace with the evil empire and winding up the cold war. Laura, say the Texas friends, is appalled at the way her husband is viewed overseas, and is pressing Bush to think about his place in history, just like Nancy did with Reagan. Short of turning Osama bin Laden into Mikhail Gorbachev, this might not be easy. Still, it will be fun watching her try, particularly since no less a figure than Karl Rove says Laura was the biggest asset the Republicans had on the campaign trail. One of her better speeches mourned the fact that nobody else seemed to know what a sweet, soft guy George W really is underneath it all.
Job security for US ambassadors
Bush has made one smart move already, asking Colin Powell to tell US ambassadors around the world that they are no longer automatically required to submit their resignations following the November presidential election. According to Powell's personal message to the ambassadors, Bush has decided to drop the long-standing tradition in order to maintain continuity and speed up the post-election transition, usually a prolonged process since all new ambassadors have to be confirmed by the US Senate.
French queue-jumping
He may be dubbed Bush's poodle at home, but Tony Blair's almost instant post-election invitation to the White House won approving nods in Washington as no more than his due. Other world leaders literally have to wait in line to offer personal congratulations to the president. Their requests to telephone Bush are placed in a queue, with the president taking three calls a day. That means some heads of state will still be waiting to pass on their personal congrats in December. Rather than wait until sometime next year, France's Jacques Chirac found a way to jump the queue. He called Bush on Friday 5th November to say that whatever the Palestinians might be claiming, French doctors were reporting that Arafat was dead and Bush should start making appropriate preparations.
The Democrats find their scapegoat
Two signs that Democrats are starting to recover. They already have a Stop Hillary candidate, a God-fearing, centrist ex-governor with a pick-up truck from a state that voted for Bush in 2004 and 2000 - Indiana's Senator Evan Bayh.
The other sign is that they have already found one of their own to blame. This time it's Al Gore's running mate from 2000, Joe Lieberman, an engaging centrist and very Orthodox Jew who insists on walking everywhere on the sabbath. Asked to go to Florida and round up the crucial Jewish vote (along with Kerry's brother, who had converted to Judaism), Lieberman was just too honest for the party's good. "I didn't come to Florida to tell you George Bush has a bad record on Israel. He's got a good record," Lieberman told a Miami synagogue ten days before polling. Then Lieberman started giving interviews saying that people were worried that Kerry was not sufficiently pro-Israel. "I was here two or three weeks ago and this question came up a few times, not from the media but from people. This is my third stop today and you hear it one way or another with each question," he told the Jewish Week after speaking to 600 Jews at a retirement community in Delray Beach. Then came the killer quote that outraged Democrats have been emailing to each other as they scapegoat Lieberman - "Only John Kerry can eliminate those doubts." Lieberman, a big success with the Jewish vote four years ago, pleads not guilty. The key factor was a flyer that Republicans distributed around every synagogue in Florida, with a personal note from Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, saying: No president has been a better friend of Israel than George W Bush.
