If the Bush administration does transform itself, the clearest proof will come in the Middle East, writes Jonathan Freedland
The American weekly satire show Saturday Night Live used to have a neat spin on the last Republican president to serve two full terms. First it showed Ronald Reagan as most people thought they knew him - a genial old buffer who was hardly the sharpest pencil in the box. But then, behind closed doors, there was a surprise. Saturday Night Live's Reagan was suddenly revealed as an energetic, high-IQ superman - conversing with Leonid Brezhnev in Russian, scolding the Iranians in Farsi, analysing military data at computer-speed. This Reagan, the TV show suggested, was the real president.
With Reagan's heir due to be sworn in for his second term at noon today, the men around George Bush seem keen to give him the Saturday Night Live treatment.
"Aides and friends" revealed to Newsweek that the image of Bush as the lazy fratboy, more at home on the Stairmaster than with his briefing books, is a gross caricature.
On the contrary, they told the magazine, he is a "restless man who masters details and reads avidly". Chief strategist Karl Rove insists his boss sees the same papers as the rest of the team but "he'll inevitably have thought about three steps ahead of anyone in the room". And the president keeps up with the latest literary trends, reading Tom Wolfe when he's not devouring tomes on the geopolitics of the Middle East.
Perhaps this is indeed the real George Bush who has, after all, built a career by exploiting his enemies' tendency to underestimate him. Or maybe it's a clue to what kind of president his aides hope the second-term Bush will be.
For a second inauguration offers the chance for a new start. Previous occupants of the White House have sometimes used their second bite of power differently from their first - looking to their historical legacy, replacing a partisan agenda with one that seeks to serve the longer-term national interest. In his first term, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire". In his second, he sought an accommodation with Moscow, even coming close to agreeing total nuclear disarmament with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Might Bush repeat the pattern, leading in a strikingly different direction to the past four?
The sceptical answer is that he'll be lucky to lead anywhere at all. Recent second terms have been notoriously unproductive, and scandal-prone - think Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica - before jockeying for the presidential succession reduces the incumbent to a lame duck two years before he leaves office.
The terrain looks especially unpromising for Bush, whose approval ratings hover just above 50 per cent - the lowest for any returning president since Richard Nixon.
Nevertheless, Bush is ambitious, setting out grand goals, foreign and domestic. As he said immediately after his victory last November, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."
The likeliest scenario, at least in foreign policy, is that he will use that momentum to serve up more of the same.
On this reading, the US will not rush for the exits from Iraq but will, in the president's words, "stay on the offence".
Iraqis will vote at the end of the month, Bush will hail the ballot as a great day for freedom - but he will not pull the troops out. Instead he will continue the current policy of Iraqification, training the country's own security forces until, as he puts it, democracy can endure even without the presence of US guns. If that takes years, so be it.
It's even conceivable that Bush will extend the project.
He speaks with fervour of his mission to democratise the Middle East - believing it to be a goal equal to Reagan's vision of a free eastern Europe.
Iran would be the obvious new front, which could explain the weekend revelations that US special forces have been on the ground in that country, scoping out nuclear sites for future military attack. Far from feeling chastened by Iraq, Bush 2 might feel as if his work has only just begun.
There are some pointers in this direction. Despite the cull of Bush's first-term cabinet, the key hawks are still in place, starting with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Note too the elevation of Alberto Gonzales to attorney general: as White House counsel, he commissioned a memo justifying torture and described the Geneva convention as "quaint".
One last factor would suggest an unremittingly Bushite second term. Republicans, pumped by their November success in the House and Senate, are in confident, aggressive mood.
The latest conservative obsession is contempt for the United Nations, with Kofi Annan firmly in their sights. With this as his flank, Bush will be under pressure to keep the rudder tilted right.
For all that, it is not delusional to hope that a new Bush could yet surface - one more like the probing, thoughtful homme sérieux described to Newsweek. The crucial witness here is the woman who appeared before the Senate this week, Condoleezza Rice. She is no Colin Powell, but by placing such a close confidante at the State Department, Bush has upgraded the status of diplomacy itself.
And Rice's deputy is to be Bob Zoellick, a veteran of Bush's father's administration - and an old-style Republican internationalist à la James Baker. That could augur well for a more engaged, alliance-conscious approach. Advocates of this view cite two items of evidence. First, they say that the neo-cons have been discredited: they promised that "old Europe" could be ignored without consequences and yet the consequences have been severe, leaving the US alone in its task of Iraqi training, for example, when French or German help was badly needed.
Second, runs this argument, circumstances have changed: witness the recent Ukrainian episode, which brought Europe and America together against Russia.
If the Bush administration does transform itself, the clearest proof will come in the Middle East. In the first term, Bush kept his distance. Now, with Mahmoud Abbas rather than Yasser Arafat leading the Palestinians, hopes are high that Washington will get stuck in.
If that happens, with Rice taking a hands-on role, applying pressure to Ariel Sharon as well as Abbas, then we will be looking at a genuinely new second act.
If, however, the demands are all one way - insisting only that the Palestinians reform, crack down on terror and democratise - then we will know the script has stayed the same.
None of this is entirely in Bush's hands. If US public opinion turns yet harder against the war in Iraq, he may have to cut and run, whatever his intentions now.
The rhetoric will certainly be grand today, as it always is - but it will be reality that decides.