All Intensive Purposes

En route to a gold medal, Ezra Klein stumbles just before he crosses the finish line:

. . . Bush isn't flailing because this White House is insufficiently politically adept. He's flailing because the major policies on which he's staked his presidency are self-destructing. Iraq is a bloodbath, the deficit threatens to swallow the country whole, the Middle East is less stable than ever, economic insecurity is rampant, inequality has risen, the government response to a national disaster was staggeringly incompetent etc, etc. . . . . Fact is, Bush is proving that presidencies are about something more than communication strategies. This White House was predicated on the belief that policies didn't matter, only politics did. That's been disproven, they've found themselves unable to fight failure with photo-ops. And this country will be better for it.

Only if you ignore the bloodbath in Iraq, the deficit, Middle Eastern instability, inequality, Louisiana, et cetera. But he's dead-on right about the White House's attitudes towards policy. Does George W. Bush believe in much of anything other than the acquisition of power? If he did, you would think that policy preferences would flow from those beliefs.