Barnicle: Bush blessed with a fortunate life and a “thanks dad” existence [View All]

September 21, 2005 | 11: 30 a.m. ET

Real world Vs. Bush's world (Mike Barnicle)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/

I am in aisle three of the supermarket, watching a woman choose between a box of store brand Frosted Flakes and the real deal sold by Kellogg. She is holding a child, maybe four years old, with one hand and a cereal box with her left. And she is about to do something that Bush the president is either incapable of doing or figures isn’t necessary: make a budget decision based on common sense and economics.

The President clearly believes everything is possible. We can hemorrhage billions in Iraq, spend billions more to rebuild New Orleans and resurrect our very own Gulf, trim taxes and throw it all on a credit card someone else – our kids – will pay in the decades ahead. This guy, smiling in his rolled up shirtsleeves, has obviously never had to sweat while signing a check for college tuition, sneakers, groceries or to bail out a basement filled with water.

His fiftyish face is nearly wrinkle free because he has been blessed with a fortunate life and a “thanks dad” existence. He is charming and friendly, isolated and uncurious about the world that has come crashing down around him - not the political world. The real one; the universe filled with disasters large and small that ordinary folks navigate on a daily basis.

So, Katrina might be to George W. Bush what Tet was to the last president from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. In February 1968, the pictures from Vietnam resulted in LBJ’s administration joining the casualty list despite the fact that the North Vietnamese suffered a true military defeat. Yet it reality didn’t matter. Impressions won the day.