Is Bush Exhausted or Just Resting?

Which is it? Is the Bush Administration finished, exhausted? Or is the wily poker player just sitting back faking out the political opposition?

Talking with Hugh Hewitt, the indefatigable Mark Steyn, (perm), asserts that the Bush Administration won’t do anything about Iran.

I think it does seem to me exhausted. And in a strange way, a lot of the things that he's getting into trouble with over the moment, like the $3 a gas pump, is, I think, a reflection of...it doesn't even have the sort of strength of will to drag its own party with him.

But over at The American Thinker Thomas Lifson reminds us not to forget that President Bush had a reputation at Harvard as “a very avid and skillful poker player.” And in case you forgot, Bush is a Harvard MBA.

He is a trained strategist, an MBA graduate of Harvard Business School, where he learned that the point of having a strategy is to win when it counts, not just to feel good about yourself at every moment of the process.

That’s “strategery” to you and I. Lifson likes to call the strategic-poker-player Bush

persona "The Crawford Kid." It is an identity the President probably would never embrace, because keeping it secret keeps his opponents unwary. But they will never learn. Contempt for the President and their own ego-maintenance demands will not let them recognize reality when they are outsmarted.

The thing to remember is that politicians are not like you and I. They enter politics because they like risk and they like to win. A crisis like Iran or like $3.00 gasoline creates a chance for some action. And maybe a chance to win.