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Time has an interesting piece this week on the administration. There's so much here its hard to know where to start. Let's see...

White House strategists believe they have ended the slide in Bush's approval ratings, which lately have been topping 40% again. "It's time for the Bush comeback story!" one coached TIME for this article. "The perfect storm has receded. We have better news in Iraq, oil prices are down, and Katrina has kind of fallen off the radar screen in terms of public concern."

Well isn't that special? Katrina has "fallen off the radar screen?" They're right. It has. Why? Lack of leadership. Governance doesn't happen on its own. It requires effort, choices, and sacrifice. This administration has made none. Off the radar? Mr. President - it is your job to ensure that the destruction of a major American city doesn't fall "off the radar." It's pathetic that we as a nation have already moved on. It's criminal that you have.

Staying on the subject of governance....

White House advisers tell TIME that the agenda for 2006 is in flux and that senior aide Karl Rove is still cooking up ideas. But the initiatives they have settled on sound more like Clinton's brand of small-bore governance: computerizing medical records; making it easier for workers to take their health benefits with them when they leave a job and--an idea that captured Bush's imagination in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina--giving a boost to Catholic and other private schools as an alternative for inner-city children. While Bush still hopes to sign an immigration bill by summer and plans to talk a lot about the subject next year, his program to offer temporary legal status to illegal immigrant workers remains a tough sell with the conservatives in Congress.

Look, some of this is nice. But in the aftermath of Katrina he's concerned about health care portability? That's what caught his attention? Call me crazy, but when the population of one of our nation's most significant cities becomes a diaspora, how is that the policy in which you become most interested? Rather than worrying about whether or not the next group gets to take their health care with them, shouldn't we work instead to make sure we don't lose the city in the first place? These people are nuts.

Friends of Rove, however, say that he feels bruised by the leak probe and that his relationship with his boss has never fully recovered from the fact that early in the investigation, he underplayed his role as a source for the journalists who revealed CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity. Says a Bush confidant: "The relationship is not bad, just changed." Another sign of the investigation's toll on the White House operation is how much less Vice President Dick Cheney, 64, is seen and felt in the West Wing these days. The indictment of his former top aide, Scooter Libby, "hit him hard. Scooter was like a brother and a policy soul mate," says a Cheney friend. The Vice President once worked the same famously long hours as Rove and chief of staff Andrew Card, but now he has scaled back his White House schedule to being there "when he needs to be," the friend says, and otherwise keeps a regimen that is "a little more reflective of his age, station and health."

Just wait until Fitzmas comes round again and then we'll talk.

And then, they save the best for last:

However improbable the odds at this point or modest his short-term goals, aides say, Bush still subscribes to Rove's long-held dream that his will be the transformational presidency that lays the groundwork for a Republican majority that can endure, as Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition did, for a half-century or more. Once he gets past the midterm elections, Bush plans to introduce a concept that, if anything, is even more ambitious than his failed Social Security plan: a grand overhaul that would include not only that program but Medicare and Medicaid as well. Says strategist McKinnon: "He knows that part of what he brings to the presidency is an ability and commitment to chart a long course under public pressure." The question that will be answered in the coming year is whether America still believes in George Bush enough to follow.

This is just insane on so many different levels I don't know where to start. First off, attempting something of that size in years 7 and 8 of your term is just impossible. Even a cursory reading of history suggests that it is several realms beyond impossible. Second, if he couldn't pull off Social Security destruction, what makes him think he can go even bigger and succeed? Now that said, I certainly don't want to discourage him. A move like that would be the gift that kept on giving through the 2008 election, but... Wow. Rove claims to be such a great student of history, but the stuff he does just makes no long-term sense. I just don't understand it.

Go back to your books. Look at the things Hoover did in the year or two before the 1932 election. Since Rove seems to like FDR so much, here's an FDR quote from Wikipedia's entry on Hoover's presidency.

During the 1932 elections, Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the dole of the government. He attacked Herbert Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible," and of leading "the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history."

The taxing too much bit won't work in 2008, nor will the tariffs... but national debt? spending? government control? Forget the words. Watch the deeds. They never lie.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress has more. As does Carpetbagger, who absolutely nails it:

It's a fascinating juxtaposition. They see improvements on the war and gas prices, but they don't see Katrina's devastation at all. It's not the situation on the Gulf Coast has improved; it's that the situation now lacks political significance. If people in DC aren't talking about the hurricane anymore, then Bush's failures lack salience, which makes it easier to sell a "comeback story." In September, the president pledged to "do what it takes" and "stay as long as it takes" to rebuild New Orleans "higher and better." Now, however, New Orleans doesn't matter nearly as much, not because the conditions have improved, but because the political world has moved on. It's the politics of incompetence followed by the politics of limited attention spans.

Governing and campaigning are not even remotely similar, yet this administration believes they are one in the same. That, more than anything else, is what will do long term damage to this nation.

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