In which, chastised, we rescind our dismissal of Barack Obama

Not.

George W. Bush bristles at any attempt to assess his presidency while he’s still alive, never mind in office. By the time history has judged him, he says, we’ll all be dead. But everyone who judged his presidency a disaster before it began — for me the clincher was his disappearance and ashen-faced return in the first few days when Florida was in doubt — was right. I don’t see any reason to give Barack Obama any more of a pass than I gave to Bush, or any more of a pass now that he’s won the election than I gave him when he was only running.

I should add, though, that Obama may well prove to be the most personally interesting president since Nixon, with whom he has much else in common. He won’t be as imaginative as Nixon was, and all the lawbreaking has been taken care of by the Bush administration, and he has run to Nixon’s right on several important domestic issues, but I suspect they would recognize one another even in the darkest bar. I wish Hunter Thompson were alive today with his talent intact; he could say for sure.

Bush is all creep; Nixon kept one clean corner in his mind, but even his own campaign committee called him a creep, and he was a morass of resentments and regrets. Obama can be a bit creepy, as who among us can’t, but it isn’t fundamental. He won’t be consumed in a fire he lit, like Nixon was, and he won’t be constantly pissing in the punch as Bush, the malevolent moron, does (and lest we forget, still has more than two months left in which to do).

But he is, like Nixon, an outsider, and it will inform his presidency as it did Nixon’s, albeit almost certainly in less inimical fashion.

The hope I had for Obama was that once in office, he’d have a Saul-falling-from-the-donkey moment and turn into the radical Republicans pretend to believe he is. But the more I see of him the more convinced I am that he’s far too careful to take a tumble from a donkey, or even to get near enough one to make it any risk at all. He’s more likely to legislate donkeys out of D.C. than he is to ride one.

So the theatre will be different. It’s not hard, though, to imagine Obama on his knees in a hallway communing with portraits of dead presidents — Nixon’s must be there — toward the end of his term, wondering what went wrong and what he could have done.

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Adding … Let the disenchantment begin.