Incompetent: One thing that has been made abundantly clear in the first five years of the Bush presidency is that Mr. Bush is not a multi-tasker. Instead, like many people who are accustomed to wealth and privilege, he is an inflexible and incurious autocrat who surrounds himself with cronies who work tirelessly to keep reality at bay from their Dear Leader.

Reality has a way of seeping in, however, and now, relatively early in his second term, President Bush is facing real scandals – all of them of his own making. His team is telling the Washington Post that, like presidents Clinton and President Reagan, both of whom faced scandals in their second terms – Mr. Bush will also compartmentalize his troubles and continue to do his job:

Dismissing all the “background noise,” Bush said, “the American people expect me to do my job, and I’m going to.”

“I think I’ve heard that one before,” Mark Fabiani, a former Clinton White House lawyer, said with a laugh yesterday. “But it comes down to the person. Anybody can deliver the line. The question is: Can you compartmentalize these issues so they don’t consume you? And I think Bush’s job is more difficult than Clinton’s because the questions here go right to the heart of the presidency.”

Mr. Fabiani’s point is key: the scandals of the Bush presidency – from lying about the reasons for war to nominating an obvious stooge to the Supreme court to the poor response of his government to the hurricane in the Gulf Coast – are derived from Mr. Bush’s policies (or lack thereof).

Increasingly, what “the American expect” Mr. Bush to do is follow the example of another second term president – Mr. Nixon – and resign.