Profiles in dis-courage

By Libby Spencer

It's the holiday so everybody is running profile pieces today. You have your odd couple Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It doesn't say much other than Democrats generically are viewed much more favorably than our so-called leaders. They finally get to the point in the last sentence:

"The biggest thing is the public's frustration with Iraq," said pollster Andrew Kohut. "People expected them to achieve things, they expected them to achieve a way out of Iraq."

Exactly. Instead we got a lot of political posturing and shadow boxing when they should be throwing knockout punches at the White House.

Newsweek has a really long profile on lazy Fred Thompson. It doesn't offer much new either, other than officially noting that Jeri seems much more into the competition than Fred is and once again the punch line comes in the very last sentence:

Thompson, who has already been president three times in the movies, is about to find out how much harder it is to play commander in chief when you don't have a script.

I've been saying that right along. I've seen him deliver off the cuff remarks and he's really a terrible public speaker.

And the WaPo does a followup on the new Draper book about Bush. This is one is interesting in that it gives some details on the infighting in the inner circle. Not much about the preznit himself though, outside of this:

Draper offers some intriguing details about Bush's personal habits, such as his intense love of biking. He reports that White House advance teams and the Secret Service "devoted inordinate energy to satisfying Bush's need for biking trails," descending on a town a couple of days before the president's arrival to find secluded hotels and trails the boss would find challenging.

The last sentence is kind of cute, too:

Noting that he ran into former president Bill Clinton at the United Nations last year, Bush added, "Six years from now, you're not going to see me hanging out in the lobby of the U.N."

Right. If, there's any justice in the world, six years from now we'll find Bush hanging out in the lobby of the Hague waiting for the verdict on his war crimes.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)