AS THE PRESS TURNS. It's worth reading this Washington Post article to get a feel for how fully the press corps. is turning against Bush. The first graf is an explanation of Bush's "only talking point," that Democrats won't appropriate his desired funds. That alone is remarkable: Mere months ago, the talking point would simply be presented as a point, not identified as spin, and attributed to Bush's "strategists [who] hope to demonstrate strength and turn the tables on a Democratic Congress that may be overreaching." Hell, remember when the press was willing to believe that Bush didn't use polling? And from there, the article only gets worse. "[A]s he answered questions yesterday before heading off for an Easter break, Bush was confronted with another narrative, this one about friends and voters losing faith in his leadership. He is not, he said in response to a question, more "isolated from his own party in Congress" than any president of the past half-century, as one conservative columnist wrote. He has not, he said, lost his "gut-level bond with the American public," as the chief strategist of his 2004 campaign wrote." To place such doubts so prominently is murder. Indeed, I was going to compare it to Clinton's lame protestations that the presidency remained relevant, but the piece did it first: "just as President Bill Clinton found himself in 1995 maintaining that he was still relevant after the Republican takeover of Congress, Bush was left to argue that he is not isolated when reporters quizzed him on the topic." As the piece closes, it brings up Matthew Dowd's defection from Bush and his denunciation of the president's policies. "Dowd, contacted later by e-mail, chose not to engage in a debate. He had said his piece. "I don't have anything to add," he wrote. And neither did Bush." That's the last sentence of an article about Bush's press conference: That Bush had nothing to add. --Ezra Klein
