Bush in Asia - The soft bigotry of low expectations

When nobody expects anything of you, it's hard to disappoint. Thus, George W. Bush begins his visit to Asia.

President George W. Bush, seeking to reassert U.S. influence in Asia during meetings with leaders in the region this week, is bringing a limited agenda and few tools to advance it.

With his administration focused on Iraq and terrorism over the last four years, U.S. engagement in Asia has amounted to a collection of bilateral issues, mostly involving trade, said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``It's been a pretty one- dimensional policy,'' Lardy said. ``Things have been drifting.''

It is difficult to understand what the strategy is here. He says a bunch of nasty things about people who disagree with his presidency, who happen to be the majority of Americans, and then heads off onto a trip with a scant agenda and no plan of attack even for that. Does he imagine his insults followed by a waste-of-time foreign trip will improve his political fortunes?

What happened to Mr. Karl "Back on His Game" Rove? I thought he was, you know, back on his game. You'd think that a genius back on his game, as Karl is said to be, might have been able to keep Bush from giving that dreadful Veterans Day speech that was all about him: explaining himself; defending himself; justifying himself. You'd think that Bush's Brain would have actually come up with a substantive agenda for this trip to keep the president from looking like he's running away from his political troubles.

If he doesn't perform any better in Asia than he did in Latin America, he might come home to find his approval numbers hovering around the two-bit mark.