KEY POINTS:
Early on Wednesday, our time, President Obama will make his inaugural address and George W. Bush will be helicoptered away from power. It is hard to remember a greater sense of relief.
All eyes naturally will be on Obama and all ears attuned for a speech that must
live up to the oratory of his campaign as well as address the mess Bush leaves. Before he disappears over the horizon, there ought to be some reflections in America about how he came to hold its highest office.
Many times I have marvelled at the United States presidential production line. Not all have been likeable characters but they were men of quality in their own way.
Even Nixon. There is a superb study of Nixon in cinemas at the moment, a re-enactment of David Frost's interview project with the disgraced President a few years after his resignation.
The film depicts Nixon's dark sides in full, the suspicions, vindictiveness, delusions and overwhelming self pity. But it also gives him a stature and gravitas that is probably accurate.
Nobody used to reach the White House without serving a testing apprenticeship in public service and surviving the longest and most financially demanding election race in the world. George W. Bush got there on his father's name.
Maybe in any other year it wouldn't have worked. But voters of 2000 had not a care in the world. The Cold War was gone, the economy strong, the world newly wired to be one vast computer.
The worries were those of prosperity: high house prices, high interest rates, illegal immigration. How good it would be to have those worries back.
Americans felt comfortable enough to give the likeable bloke a fighting chance. The result was close enough for a few faulty ballot papers to be decisive.
The following year the world changed. America needed a mature and effective response to a spectacular act of sabotage on its own soil from a foreign source. The likeable bloke adopted the language of war comics and started picking fights with countries he didn't like.
Most fatally, he harboured an Oedipal urge to outdo his father on Iraq. Insiders testify that Bush was obsessed with Saddam Hussein before 9/11. After the attack he proclaimed a unique American right to wage preventive war, found a phony pretext to invade Iraq and looked forward to the neocons' promised outbreak of democracy in liberated Arab lands.
He liberated only religious tensions. Just about every election in Middle East since then has been a triumph for militant Islamists.
Meanwhile the cause of all the dissension, the creation of Israel, was of little interest to him. He presided over an agreement on a "roadmap" to renewed talks, promised to "ride herd" on its progress but never did.
When Israel broke the agreement by allowing West Bank settlers to continue seizing Palestinians' homes, Bush said nothing. He leaves most world problems much worse than he found them.
It would be unfair to blame him entirely for the threatening depression. The President is only one player in US economic policy. The Federal Reserve is the culprit for the failure to contain the property price bubble and regulate the lending that led to the crisis.
But Bush's weak budget control, cutting taxes but not spending, turned Clinton's surpluses into deepening deficits that helped fuel the fire. A better President might have heeded warnings, cut his spending and helped create a climate for a more cautious monetary policy.
Historians will continue to debate whether he was America's worst President. None in our lifetime was worse. Only Nixon left office with a lower level of public approval and Nixon's domestic crimes were balanced by some international achievements.
Nixon's reputation was not rehabilitated by the Frost interviews, nor by history. Some reviewers of Bush this week believe he will fare better. In interviews he gave, and in a farewell speech yesterday, he claimed credit for the fact that America has gone seven years without another terrorist attack.
But every report of this claim has added the words, "yet" or "so far". Bush has not tackled the tensions that have given rise to Islamist terrorism, he has made them worse.
The homeland security of which he is proud, have given us airport checks designed to foil the last form of terrorism, not the next.
What can be said for Bush? He never wavered under criticism. He stuck to his guns in more ways than one.
He is personally modest, has a self-effacing sense of humour. He is probably a decent, considerate, amusing companion in ordinary life, a thoroughly good bloke.
But he was just wrong. Stubbornly, monumentally wrong in most of the important decisions he had to make. Yet voters made the greater mistake. May democracy's fabled wisdom never fail so badly again.
