You've Been a Great Audience (Mail & Guardian, SOUTH AFRICA)

The gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning. Admit it: there's a part of him you're going to miss. Oliver Burkeman on Bush's comic legacy.

In the modern TV era, to elect a president -- or even just to observe US politics from overseas -- is to invite him and his family into your home for at least four years, and to learn altogether too much information about their lives. Bill Clinton's sexual activities are only the most lurid example of this; in some ways, revelations of Jimmy Carter's habit of reading Bible passages to his wife at bedtime were just as personal. Yet as the administration of George Bush reaches its final days, it's hard to escape the conclusion that even the last eight horribly eventful years haven't succeeded in revealing the character of the man. You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless biographies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we're barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly, is going on in there?

During Bush's first campaign in 2000, the consensus among many liberals was that he was an idiot, a barely literate simpleton in the Chauncey Gardiner mould. Many of the greatest Bushisms date from those early days. "Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?" a windcheater-clad Bush noted during a campaign stop in South Carolina, a couple of weeks before inviting a New Hampshire audience to imagine themselves in the shoes of a single mother "working hard to put food on your family".

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