The loneliest man in Washington With the neo-cons silenced, the pragmatists disillusioned, and his puppet masters preoccupied, the president will have to go it alone for the next three years. Who's in more trouble? Him or us? BY MARK JURKOWITZ

When George W. Bush climbed to the top of the rubble of the World Trade Center, grabbed a megaphone, and declared that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon," he galvanized an entire nation. Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals would soon boost his job-approval rating to a record-setting 90 percent.

Four years later, having somehow managed to drain that huge reservoir of support and goodwill with a polarizing, arrogant, and sometimes stunningly incompetent style of governance, Bush is now a solitary figure standing in the rubble of his own second term. Having alienated friend and foe alike, he is today the loneliest man in Washington.

While Republican pragmatists are increasingly in open revolt against his policies, the hawkish neo-cons who provided the intellectual and ideological backbone to the war in Iraq are scattered and mute. Or, in the case of former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, under indictment.

Hard-line social conservatives and the Christian right have just led a stunning and successful no-holds-barred revolt against Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, wounding Bush’s presidency at a time of serious vulnerability and sending a clear message from the right side of the spectrum about who calls the shots.

Some among Bush’s inner circle and palace guard — such as top advisor Karl Rove and former House majority leader Tom DeLay — are bogged down and distracted by their own scandals, while others have moved on or assumed less influential posts. Even Bush’s penchant for filling important jobs with under-qualified cronies has recently come home to roost, as evidenced by both the disastrous Miers nomination and the post-Katrina departure of disgraced FEMA director Mike ("Heckuva Job") Brown.

"How can President Bush repair his second term?" wondered Tim Russert on Sunday’s Meet the Press, echoing the growing perception that his floundering presidency is hanging in the balance. The latest Gallup poll doesn’t bring glad tidings. Bush’s job-approval rating is mired at 41 percent (down 11 points from where it was at the start of the year), with 55 percent labeling his presidency a failure to date and the same percentage predicting that he will not do better in the remaining three years of his term. Recent Gallup numbers also show him getting poor grades on his handling of the big issues — the economy, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the conflict in Iraq.

As Bush struggles to save his presidency, what is so striking is how solitary, how exiled he has become. And given his tendency to hunker down in the bunker, avoid inconvenient realities and facts, and plunge ahead stubbornly with failed policies, that doesn’t bode well — either for him or for us.

ALTERED STATES

With his fateful decision to invade Iraq, Bush ensured that, for better or worse, his legacy would be that of a war president. And last Friday, when prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald stood before the microphone to say that Libby was "the first official to disclose [Valerie Plame’s occupation] outside the government to a reporter" and "then lied about it afterward," he struck a grievous blow to the heart of the administration’s Iraq-war boiler room: the office of the vice-president.

The influential Libby has already resigned and Cheney — more reclusive and secretive than ever — is certain to find his role in advancing the administration’s discredited WMD rationale for war under increasing scrutiny. "How much collateral damage has Mr. Cheney sustained?" the New York Times recently asked. The answer may be "plenty."

But Libby and Cheney are not the only members of the neo-con war cabal to find their public roles dramatically compromised or altered. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary who was once the ubiquitous voice of Bush’s unilateralist regime-changing foreign policy is now off the radar screen, working as president of the World Bank. Powerful former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith resigned — officially for personal reasons — this year. Feith’s colleague and mentor Richard Perle — dubbed by some "the Prince of Darkness" — who once served as chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, is also out of public view these days. The bombastic, supremely confident defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who once got boffo raves for his cantankerous shoot-from-the-hip performances at televised wartime briefings, also seems to be avoiding the cameras and headlines.

All of which pretty much leaves Bush alone on the public stage — the last holdout of the coalition of the willing and the willful — to defend an increasingly unpopular war as the carnage and instability inside Iraq drags on. Much to the administration’s chagrin, the media did pay considerable attention when the grim milestone of 2000 US war dead was reached in late October. That month, in which 94 Americans were killed in Iraq, proved to be the costliest in US lives since January.