Which Event Most Damaged Bush Presidency?

We're now just three weeks away from George W. Bush's last day in office, and the sparing over his legacy has heated up a few degrees. In separate interviews with Vanity Fair magazine, former Bush aides Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett concur about the "tipping point" responsible for turning the American public against their former boss. The event? Hurricane Katrina and the Bush government's ham-fisted response. Here's Dowd:

"The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiative? It didn't matter. P.R. It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Bartlett, the former White House communications director, knew too well what the response to the hurricane meant:

"Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

For those with short memory spans, Hurricane Katrina--in which 1,836 people lost their lives--blew ashore on August 29, 2005. By this time in Bush's presidency, "No Child Left Behind" had been the law of the land for 4 years, the country had endured the terrorist attacks of 9/11, two years of difficult fighting in Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib torture revelations. Some combination of all of those events has conspired to send the president out of office with a dismal approval rating. But, like Dowd and Bartlett, if you were asked to pinpoint a single turning point that soured Americans on their commander-in-chief, what would it be?





If your pick wasn't listed, please add it to the comment section.