The Legacy of a President

In the Washington Post Richard Cohen notes that President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency to his legacy. But after commenting on the still empty crater where the World Trade Center once stood, the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, the fact that Osama bin Laden remains free, and the mess in Iraq he concludes:

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide a fitting memorial to those who died. "We dig a grave in the breezes," Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem "Death Fugue." We can dig ours as deep as the World Trade Center once was tall. The ugly emptiness will remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They can't build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bush's presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.