LOOK, MA, NO NOTES!

US president no longer 'misunderestimated' (James Harding, June 5 2003, Financial Times)

During the 1992 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush dismissed his Democratic challengers: "They criticise our country and say we are less than Germany and slightly better than Sri Lanka. My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos."

A couple of years ago, the American people may have believed that of Mr Bush's dog, but not his son. When George W. Bush came to office he was considered not just a neophyte, but an ignoramus. On the way to the White House, Mr Bush had flunked questions on the leaders of Pakistan, Chechnya and elsewhere, struggled to tell the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia and called the Greeks "Grecians".

But all that now seems like another man at another time. Over the past week, the US president has appeared as a self-assured diplomat. Reminiscent of Richard Nixon flying home from Beijing 30 years ago, the irrepressible Mr Bush took what for him was the highly unusual step of inviting reporters into the conference room on Air Force One to sum up an "historic trip".

He described how he guided Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, out into the garden to chat
informally rather than stick to the roundtable talks indoors.

"What I wanted to do is to observe the interplay between the two; did they have the capacity to relax in each other's presence for starters? And I felt
they did," Mr Bush said on the way from the Aqaba summit to Thursday's rallying of the US troops at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar.

As with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, so with the leaders in the Middle East: Mr Bush's "style of statecraft", as his aides call it, is personal, and he reads the body language. "My instincts were such that, this is a guy I can trust," Mr Bush said of the rapport he struck up with Mr Putin. "I've spent enough time with Ariel Sharon to know he's the kind of guy when he says something, he means it. I'm getting the same sense about prime minister Abbas."

In Sharm el-Sheikh, Mr Bush strolled into a meeting with a group of Arab leaders without the support of his staff and came out 90 minutes later slapping the Middle East royalty on the back. [...]

The president, of course, can still fluff his lines. The longest word of the trip - contiguous - proved to be a big problem. On Tuesday, he said "continuous" by mistake; on Wednesday, it took him three attempts to get out "contiguity" without choking on the middle syllable.

Unfortunately, given the dynamics of the Middle East, the question now is who is assassinated first by his own radicals: Abbas or Sharon? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2003 9:01 AM