President Bush repeated one of his most famous lines yesterday. “Sometimes you’ve misunderestimated me,” he told the White House press corps at his last news conference. No one laughed, but such are the risks of self-parody from the world’s most powerful pulpit. The outgoing President’s consolation is that few will say he lacked the courage of his convictions.

Mr Bush hopes that history will be kinder to him than the press has been. Thirty thousand extra soldiers have turned the tide in Iraq, he said. Thirty thousand people plucked from roofs in New Orleans belie the view that Hurricane Katrina brought the federal Government to its knees. He acknowledged some mistakes — in Abu Ghraib, for instance, and in declaring “mission accomplished” when it had barely begun. But he refused to accept that his country’s moral standing had suffered on his watch, and called his record “good” and “strong”.

Would that it were. In fact Mr Bush’s record is tarnished by a fundamental reluctance to grapple with the complexities of his office. After eight years’ aversion to considered policy, an assertion of “good” is not good enough.

Mr Bush came to power promising a compassionate conservatism designed to reinforce the Republicans’ base and their hold on the political centre. In the end it did neither. The Bush years have produced an expansion of entitlements, no serious welfare reform and tax cuts for the wealthy while freezing a series of auspicious social programmes. The President’s too-timid healthcare reform plans failed at their first legislative hurdle. In education, his No Child Left Behind Act was hamstrung from the start by lack of funding. His amnesty for illegal immigrants fell prey to party pressure, so he built a fence instead.

Like so many of his predecessors, Mr Bush will be remembered chiefly for his foreign policy. Indeed, his Administration effectively began on September 11, 2001, when an aide interrupted his reading to a group of schoolchildren to tell him that the World Trade Centre was in flames. That awful moment gave the Bush presidency the purpose that hitherto it had lacked.

The two wars that the President authorised after the 2001 attacks will be, for good or ill, his political epitaph. Whatever the merits of those military interventions, which this newspaper supported, Mr Bush's failure in the soft power of diplomacy was abject. The responsibility for squandering the goodwill felt in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was his, and he surely knows it.

The past two years have confirmed this view. On Mr Bush’s watch, the US Government has made a genuine effort to engage other nations and has worked assiduously through the UN. But the Bush presidency took too long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings and, in the longer historical account, may never do so.

As the standing of the United States in the world has suffered, so has its once stellar economy. The crisis that began in the American sub-prime mortgage market has travelled the world and arrived back home as a recession. Its deficit stands at more than $10 trillion, rising at $3.4 billion a day, with no guarantee that the second $350 billion tranche of aid to banks and business that Mr Bush released yesterday will start the process of resuscitation.

In his final weeks in power Mr Bush has warmed to the theme of having done what he considered right, not what was popular. He prided himself on taking decisions on gut instinct. But given the failures of foreign policy, the mismanagement of two wars, the obstinate re- fusal to embrace science or tackle climate change and the unravelling of the economy, the lesson of the Bush presidency is surely that the gut is for digestion, not decision-making. Mr Bush’s convictions were strong, but too often they were wrong.