It's been the least successful year of his presidency.

There have been occasions such as the 1988 debate involving Dan Quayle when questions were raised about whether the candidate was capable. The vice presidential debates don't matter until people mess up.

A partisan battle in the Senate is politics as usual, and he won't suffer nearly as much from that as he's suffering now from all the talk about corruption and Republicans jumping off the ship. This is the easiest thing to do.

The Senate elected officials have to be more sensitive to constituency issues than does the president. We're beginning to see the beginning of the lame duck factor.

Bush is the most aggressive user of executive power since Richard Nixon.

They're up for election, and he's not. We're moving into crunch time very quickly, and they are obviously afraid of the political fallout.

I don't see it going anywhere, unless there's a crisis.

The likelihood is that the Democrats will pick up a few seats in the Senate, but not enough to wrest control from the Republicans.

There was not a lot of passion. It does give the Republicans a legislative agenda in addition to the terrorism theme, and any agenda is better than no agenda.