Editor's Note: Scene friend and noted author John Egerton will share his views of the Bush administration's foreign affairs policy and the election in upcoming pieces. Below are his thoughts, recorded amid the blazing days of August, on the American economy that the Bush team has created.

Cynicism peaks in February, when it feels as if it has been winter since you were a child," wrote upstate New Yorker Barry Crimmins in his new book of political satire, Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal.

As he was struggling to survive the bitterly frigid season of 2002-03—and along with it, the throbbing cacophony of hysteria that set the stage for America's unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq—Crimmins reflected: "This is the perfect metaphorical winter. Like the court-appointed Bush administration, it is merciless and seemingly perpetual. Something worse always seems imminent."

The simile resonates with me. I have never experienced a rural New York winter, but thinking of the Bush regime as an endless and ever-worsening Arctic landscape strikes me as a perfect fit.

An equivalent seasonal ordeal in the Southern reaches of these United States is known as the dog days, a hot-coals phenomenon that rolls around almost every summer. Like Northern winters, the dog days can bring to mind endless torture—and they also lend themselves effectively to political metaphor.

In the South, August is the cruelest month. Most afternoons, the sky fades to a pallid off-white that swallows up shadows and ratchets the solar intensity to laser-beam level. Heat and humidity race for the triple digits like hot-rodders with the hammer down. The earth cracks open, but nothing leaks out except billows of dust and swarms of yellow jackets. Running water slows to a trickle, the flowers wilt and the once-glorious tomato crop is reduced to a pathetic handful of knobby green spheres no bigger than golf balls. Only the kudzu thrives, the better to conceal mosquitoes, horseflies, lurking copperheads.

It is in the torrid, sultry days of August, when it's too hot for a dog to scratch fleas, that Southerners pass through their crucible of endurance. They undergo a severe testing of body and soul. Their resolve weakens; hope and faith hang by the merest thread. And the most agonizing part of all is not the heat itself but the knowledge—the absolute certainty—that the worst is yet to come. It will still be 90 degrees in the shade on into this month of September, and perhaps beyond.

No wonder so many Southerners (particularly those old enough to remember the pre-air conditioning era) live in fear and loathing of eternal hell-fire. In a manner of speaking, we've been there.

This twilight zone of the spirit is seared indelibly upon the brain of every road-tested Southern politician facing serious opposition at the polls. If he (or she) has had four years, more or less, to lay out a program of leadership and service worthy of the people's trust, that amounts to a built-in advantage that should be sufficient to defeat all challengers. But if the incumbent has repeatedly made false pronouncements, and committed many grievous mistakes without acknowledgement or apology, and left the people worse off than they were before, those frenetic final weeks preceding a November election can seem like an eternity spent schlepping down the bleak highway to hell. Exposed politicians who have known first-hand both the dog days of August and the uphill climb to an election defeat will tell you that the pain of those two agonies is indistinguishable. "Merciless and seemingly perpetual" hardly does descriptive justice to either condition.

George W. Bush is in that zone right now. He is enough of a Southerner to know about the weather (though it's more precise to describe him as a sometime-west Texan who affects "the cowboy way" and sports a practiced down-home personality light years from his Northeastern upper-crust roots). He is also enough of a politician (if not yet an experienced loser) to know how far it is as the crow flies from one election to the next—and how immeasurably distant it can feel if the crow in question happens to be walking and carrying an empty gas can.

As a mounting wave of voters starts to figure him out, President Bush is looking more and more like a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that within any given subculture (corporations, for example, or the political arena), people tend to get promoted to the level of their incompetence. (For the record, I should note that Bush also lacked the qualifications to be governor of Texas, but got the job anyway—twice—and used it as a stepping-stone to the presidency.)

Since he moved into the White House in January 2001, Mr. Bush has developed an astonishing pattern of incapacity, inattention, mismanagement, partisanship, duplicity and hubris. Along the way, he has immodestly described himself as "a compassionate conservative," as "a uniter, not a divider," and most recently as "a war president" on a mission from God. Even as his disastrous domestic and foreign policies leave a spreading scene of desperation and havoc in their wake, Mr. Bush's image-makers flank him with busts of Lincoln and Churchill, seeking innocence by association. If there is anything more amazing than his self-evident shortcomings, it's the fact that a rock-solid 40 to 45 percent of the nation's registered voters continually approve of his performance in office.

Let me say up front that I think President Bush and the Republican Party will suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats on Nov. 2. (While I'm at it, let me go on and admit that my political forecasts are often wrong, so wrong that Bush might well take heart from this one and Kerry could view it as the kiss of death.) As a backsliding Democrat who is lukewarm on Kerry, I make my prediction soberly, not triumphantly. Kerry may well turn out to be a great president, but so far he has shown few if any flashes of greatness.

Bush, on the other hand, is a known quantity. He lost the 2000 election by more than half a million votes, but was declared the winner by a five-to-four decision of the U. S. Supreme Court. He took office without a mandate from the people, and with less to commend him than any president since Calvin Coolidge (no, make that Franklin Pierce; Coolidge did, at least, reduce the national debt by $3 billion). And when his term ends next January, George W. Bush's name will have been branded on more calamities at home and abroad than any of his 42 predecessors in the 214-year history of the American presidency.

It would take an army of scriveners to itemize the full catastrophe of Dubya's tenure in office. A rising tide of new books and video documentaries over the past couple of years has been straining to keep up with the president's misadventures, but it's a hopeless task; he generates or lends his name to manmade disasters quicker than the book and video makers and journalists can catalogue them. The most I can hope to do here is focus on the two issues that Bush-watchers, pro and anti, tend to see as paramount—the U. S. economy and the Middle East wars—and examine them in some detail.

That leaves aside for discussion elsewhere a long rap sheet on the president that ranges from the sublime (his shell game that gives seniors next to nothing and calls it "Medicare reform") to the ridiculous (his outrageous malapropisms, so many that there are now collections of them in print). You can pick a subject, almost any subject—health care, education, energy, housing, the environment, agriculture, drugs (legal and illegal), criminal justice, campaign finance reform, immigration, civil liberties, and so on down the list—and you will find little in the record that reflects favorably upon the Bush administration. That's not to say the Democrats have better ideas to offer on some of these issues—but the administration in power must run on its record, and this president's record is vulnerable to attack from every direction.

If the American people had nothing at all to complain about except the economy, they would still have a multitude of reasons to vote George W. Bush out of office. It's not just the Democrats who have grievances on fiscal matters, but let's start with them. From the far left wing to slightly right of center, theirs is a long and familiar litany of disapproval: tax cuts for the wealthy, special favors to the corporate elite, privatization of social services, shrinking health care and retirement benefits for wage-earners, a million-plus payroll jobs lost, manufacturing outsourced to third-world countries, gaping holes in the safety net for the neediest and most vulnerable Americans.

These issues accurately reflect a fundamental philosophical divide between Democrats and Republicans. In general, it is Democrats who focus on people at the lower end of the economic spectrum. They talk more about living wages and affordable housing, about the working poor, the unemployed, the uninsured and those who struggle to make ends meet on nothing but Social Security. In their idealized view, Democrats will tell you that a just and equitable economy thrives best when it causes prosperity to bubble up from its productive base, not simply trickle down from its privileged heights.

With Republicans now in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, no one should be surprised to hear the Democratic donkeys braying in lament at the spending priorities of the majority party, or to witness the trumpeting herd of Republican elephants as they go stampeding through the political zoo in Washington. Democrats should resign themselves to such measures as deregulation, privatization, even tax cuts for the wealthy, so the argument goes; after all, that's what the Republican Party believes in, and it's their turn.

It's been their turn, in fact, for the past three years and seven months—since Bill Clinton handed the White House keys to George Bush on Jan. 20, 2001. That's long enough for the new tenant to log a lease history in the place, establish his credit rating and bring his self-styled "compassionate conservative" image to bear upon the personnel and properties under his stewardship.

The profile is riddled with contradictions. Instead of cutting the federal budget, as expected, Mr. Bush expanded it sharply—not just to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but for domestic programs as well. Federal spending increased in Bush's first three fiscal-year budgets by more than 7 percent annually, not including the huge new outlays for national defense and homeland security. This is about the same level of spending growth recorded by his father and Ronald Reagan; in fact, the three Republican presidents added an average of 8 percent a year to the federal budget in their combined total of 16 years in the White House. (In contrast, non-defense discretionary spending grew by a modest 1 to 2 percent a year during Bill Clinton's second term.)

Here is another comparison: The total number of federal civilian employees declined by 360,000 during Clinton's eight-year tenure. Over the past quarter-century, only two presidents have actually expanded the federal payroll roster: Reagan, who added 94,000 employees in his two terms, and the current President Bush, who has added about 20,000 so far (not counting thousands more shifted into privatized positions). In the private sector, meanwhile, the opposite is true. Not since Herbert Hoover ushered in the Great Depression has the U. S. economy sustained a net loss of payroll jobs on one president's watch. Not until Bush II.

And there is more from the overcooked budget books to digest: In the second Clinton administration, the federal government collected more than it spent—almost $560 billion more. Now, after three and a half years under Mr. Bush, that half-trillion-dollar surplus left in the kitty by Clinton, the "tax-and-spend liberal," has vanished, and in its place is a gargantuan deficit of more than $1.3 trillion, strapped to a compound interest rocket that is spiraling into the stratosphere. Fortunately for him, the CEO of America Inc., is not subject to the same scrutiny or liability as some of his closest supporters at Enron, WorldCom and other corporations now caught up in the ongoing white-collar crime wave. The only real check on George Bush's power will come when the nation votes on Nov. 2.

It would be funny if it were not so serious: There was Congress, wrangling over how to spend the windfall jackpot, and Wham! It's gone! And there is the president, throwing money at tax cuts to stimulate the economy, at public schools attended by few children of Republicans, at arcane prescription drug "benefits" (some say "crumbs") for the elderly under Medicare. Is this LBJ? FDR? Nope, it's W!! Not bad for a devoted disciple of President Reagan, the slash-and-burn archconservative whose in-your-face credo was, "Government is the problem." (Actually, Reagan was no slacker himself when it came to maxing out the credit cards; in his two terms, he spent us into a $1.5 trillion hole.)

While trashing the tax-and-spend Democrats, the Bush accountants have adopted a "borrow and spend" philosophy. Foreign countries are now financing close to half of our national debt, which means that future generations will face huge tax increases to cover the payment-due bills from Japan, China and other prosperous nations. Our trade deficit is tilted wildly in their direction, too. Some deal: We're buying their goods, and they're buying our money.

Hard as it is to believe, this is the record of a political party that just 10 years ago, in Congressman Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," promised to bring us balanced budgets, reduced debt, fiscal responsibility and a booming economy. What we have got instead from four years of the Bush administration is recession and anemic recovery, two major tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, a net loss of a million jobs and an unemployment rate of "only" 5.5 percent (with millions more resigned to lower-paying positions or giving up the job search altogether).

Reagan was the first American president to give this philosophy a name. He called it "supply-side economics." Its central strategy was to keep cutting the taxes of the wealthy until people with extra cash started spending more, causing the economy to grow and the benefits to "trickle down" to the lower classes. Mr. Bush's father once called this "voodoo economics." Though it produced horrendous deficits and a deep recession under Reagan, the true believers loved its selective benefits: cuts in government social programs, an ever-shrinking federal presence in daily life, less regulation of private enterprise, and the blossoming of a free-wheeling market economy that catered to the established powers.

Reagan's age, amiability, acting skills and pure luck helped him to come through eight years virtually unscathed, the "Teflon president." To adoring Republicans he was the grand old man, a star even to those in the party who quietly whispered the "voodoo economics" tag. Among his lucky breaks was getting credit, on his inauguration day in 1981, for the release of 52 American hostages from Iran—an achievement not due to him but to his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who had spent 444 days trying to free them. (Some guys have all the luck. Carter also caught the wrath of the American driving public when gas at the pump shot up 50 percent during his tenure, but the $1.25 a gallon we were paying at the start of Reagan's first term was back to $1.18 when he left office.)

Now compare Reagan's smooth sailing with that of George W. Bush—the cocky, swaggering straw boss of an executive team that has copied Reagan's economic philosophy with such disastrous results that even many alarmed conservative voices are being raised. No less a capitalist than Warren Buffett, one of America's richest and most successful entrepreneurs, took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to shame the administration for trying to eliminate taxes on dividends. Noting that he and other critics of such a windfall for the wealthy were being branded as "promoters of class warfare," Buffet shot back: "The fact is, however, that their proposal does promote class welfare. For my class."

Surveying the management of fiscal policy by the Bush economic team, the High-Establishment London Financial Times trenchantly noted that "the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." GOP Senator John McCain has repeatedly criticized Bush administration spending as "reckless and out of control," and as many as 10 of the 50 Republican members of the Senate have balked at one Bush initiative or another that they characterized as corporate welfare, tax giveaways or pork-barrel profligacy. (The tax rebates, incidentally, were billed by the administration as "primarily to benefit the middle class," but an August report from the Congressional Budget Office showed just the opposite: The top 1 percent of taxpayers—people making $1.2 million-plus a year—got average paybacks of $78,000, while the middle 20 percent, with average incomes of $57,000, got only slightly more than $1,000 apiece.)

A major national opinion poll reported by the Pew Research Center in late August found fully two-thirds of Americans dissatisfied with the state of the economy, and on that issue they favor John Kerry's promises over George Bush's practices by a double-digit margin. Some prominent conservatives have begun to wonder aloud of late whether President Bush is, in his heart of hearts, a true conservative.

Now we are staggering out of the dog days, and the election of 2004 is less than two months away—and one last straw is threatening to land on the back of a camel in the Middle East. In spite of Saudi Arabia's desperate effort to keep the supply of oil on par with demand, crises in Iraq, Russia, Venezuela and other oil-producing nations, together with increasing demand from the U. S., China and others, drove crude oil prices up sharply in August. After closing at $41.50 a barrel on Aug. 2, crude gushed to a high of $49.40 on Aug. 20—an increase of over 19 percent in just 14 trading days—before falling back to under $45 a barrel at the end of the month. That's still up by about one-third since January.

Meanwhile, gas at the pump, which exceeded $2 a gallon in May and then retreated to about $1.80 in mid-August, is expected to climb past $2 again between now and Nov. 2. (A gallon of unleaded regular gas cost $1.48 when Bush took office.) Every possible supply-and-demand manipulation by the Bush administration to hold prices down until after the election can be anticipated.

The luck of the Irish sustained Reagan, but it does not appear to be smiling warmly on Bush. Even some drivers of those gas-guzzling SUVs and Humvees sporting W: THE PRESIDENT stickers seem a little less confident as they wait in line at the pump. They may go on and vote for Dubya anyway—but at some point, their self-interest will kick in, and something will have to give. It will take the luck of Reagan for Bush to get beyond the oil and gas graveyard past which he is now trying to whistle.