2005 WAS THE YEAR we celebrated the Nelson Touch, 200 years after one of the greatest naval victories in history. In America, it was the year President George Bush acquired the Medusa Touch. It started all right, in a mood of triumphal optimism, with an inauguration in Washington and an election in Iraq. But since then, everything that the President has been anywhere near has turned to stone.

The biggest domestic goal of his second term, Social Security reform, was dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. Hurricane Katrina exposed — not unexpectedly — a badly flawed disaster- response operation and, totally unexpectedly, an even more badly flawed political operation.

The nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court crumbled as soon as it was out of the President’s hand. This one, by the way, was an interesting counterpoint to the usual trope that the Republican Party is in the grip of right-wing Christian evangelicals. Bush picked a right-wing evangelical Christian for the court and what happened? Other forces in the Republican Party scorned her and blocked the nomination.

With Scooter Libby’s indictment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and the continuing investigation into Karl Rove, prosecutorial insult was added to political injury. And all of that was just on the home front. Abroad it was even worse.

Afghanistan turned out to have been not quite so pacified after all. Iran elected a mad-dog president who makes the Ayatollah Khomenei look like the Vicar of Bray. Then there was Iraq. It now looks as though the January election, with its purple-fingered defiance of medievalist Islamism and nihilist terrorism, may have been the high point. America’s reputation, already battered, was further bloodied by the damaging fight over torture.

The hapless Mr Bush couldn’t even get Christmas right, sparking a fresh controversy last week with his choice of a secular Christmas card to send to 2.3 million lucky Americans. If his enemies are correct, and he really does believe he is on a mission from God, the Almighty must have a keener sense of irony than we knew.

And so, less than a year into his third term, it is the most frequently asked question in Washington: is George Bush finished? The political prognosis doesn’t look good. The farther a president gets into his second term, the harder it gets for him to achieve much of anything. With next November’s mid-term elections, attention will shift quickly to the presidential contest beyond.

And though his aides say he will come out swinging in the new year with a packed programme aimed at restarting his presidency it already looks as though it might have had a brush with the lady with the snakes in her hair. A proposal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants is likely to enrage many in his own party. Any move towards serious reform of the tax system is bound, by its very nature, to anger at least half the voters.

And yet Mr Bush has three things going for him. The first is time. You simply can’t be a lame duck with more than three years to go before you leave office. Things have to be done; the country has to be run. If he handles matters better in early 2006 he will begin to put a bit of distance between himself and the disasters of 2005. That will help to buy a little space to achieve some successes — a new Supreme Court justice confirmed early in the new year, for example.

Then there’s the economy. The current US growth rate of 4 per cent a year gives the President a couple of advantages. It fills the federal coffers, enabling him at least to defer the ultimately inevitable and painful crunch involved in closing the fiscal deficit.

It also buys a certain amount of popular goodwill. True, there’s not much of that in evidence at present, but think how much worse it would be if unemployment and interest rates were at 10 per cent.

Finally there are the Democrats. Never underestimate the capacity of America’s opposition to find creative new ways to destroy itself. Their hand-wringing over the war is another prime example of their restless yearning to remain an opposition party.

But in the end the basic truth about the remainder of the Bush presidency is that it is all about Iraq. It will turn on the outcome of a mighty struggle — not the one between the US and its enemies on the ground in Iraq, or even the war about the war between Republicans and Democrats in Washington. It is a struggle common to all second-term presidencies — between the personal quest for a presidential legacy and the short-term exigencies of Washington’s intensely competitive politics.

No one who has heard the President in recent weeks can dispute that, whatever you may think of it, Mr Bush is deadly serious about his goal of bringing democracy to Iraq and beyond it to the blighted Middle East. If he had his druthers, the US would probably be increasing its troop strength in Iraq right now to improve the chances of making a stable democracy take hold, not thinking about decreasing it.

But Mr Bush is up against a short political timetable. Agitated Republican members of Congress with an eye on their tricky re-election campaigns next year want US forces out in as great a number as possible in 2006. Republicans are not relishing the thought of fighting the 2008 presidential election with a war still raging in Iraq. That is why, intriguingly, the one man who may be the best hope for Mr Bush is the man who once threatened to be his nemesis.

John McCain, the once maverick senator from Arizona, at odds with Mr Bush and conservatives on a number of big political issues, is the most fervent supporter of the war and, more broadly, of Mr Bush’s desire to stay the course in the Middle East. He’s also popular, with a rare ability to appeal to political independents. He looks like the only way to resolve the struggle between a legacy and an election campaign. Let’s hope President Medusa doesn’t get too close to him.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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