Last year at this time, President Bush spoke of all the "political capital" he had earned and his intention to spend it.

Despite the narrowest win for an incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1916, we heard grand talk about the creation of an "ownership society" and how the cornerstone of it would be the privatization of Social Security.

Remember Bush's inauguration address? Bush spoke the word "freedom" 27 times and "liberty" 15 times. It wasn't a surprise that the words "war," "Iraq," "Iran" and "terror" were not said at all.

Triumphalism was the mood just 12 months ago. The Republicans were now firmly in control of everything, but they forgot their natural inclination to overreach. They thought they had a mandate. What they discovered was how few people actually supported the most extreme parts of their agenda. When the truth started to seep out, everything imploded.

The GOP underestimated the widespread support for Social Security, arguably the best run and most successful government program in history. The scaremongering by the Bush administration that Social Security was approaching bankruptcy was seen as being as trustworthy as the president's justification for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and the GOP overreached in the Terri Schiavo case, piously inserting themselves in a family tragedy for political gain. Except there was no political gain, only millions who were disgusted by the GOP's phony concern.

The threats by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to employ "the nuclear option" and end filibusters on judicial nominees failed to bring Congress to a standstill, for enough members of the Senate realized that doing this would destroy the Senate and forced Frist to back down. Hurricane Katrina and the woeful federal response to the storm stripped away the thin veneer of confidence from the Bush administration.

Finally, the revelations of recent weeks of widespread covert domestic surveillance by the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency confirmed the suspicions of many that the Bush administration was more interested in intimidation of its political enemies than in fighting terrorism.

Sure, odious legislation did get passed. The bankruptcy bill that condemns millions of Americans to debt slavery. Cuts in Medicaid and student loans to pay for tax cuts for the rich. An energy bill that gives subsidies to the oil companies and does little for energy conservation. A highway bill loaded with pork barrel spending.

But Social Security was saved. The Patriot Act may not survive in its current form. And the mendacity of the Bush administration was exposed for all to see.

Overshadowing everything was Iraq, and the steady drip of revelations that confirmed what many knew was true, that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence.

The Downing Street Memos showed the Bush administration was determined to attack Iraq even though there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of links to foreign terrorists and no evidence that Iraq posed a direct or indirect threat to the United States.

That no investigation took place shows the impossibility of integrity in a one-party Congress. The news that the United States operated secret prisons and employed torture on detained "suspects," most of whom were never charged with any crime, was a deep embarrassment. Equally embarrassing was the clumsy attempts to smear one of the most hawkish member of Congress, Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, for suggesting a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The spectacle of Republicans who never served in the military attacking a decorated combat veteran was a sorry one.

The president still clings to the hope that freedom and democracy is on the march in Iraq. The reality on the ground suggests otherwise. President Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low for a second-term president, but barring impeachment or incapacitation, we still have three more years of this man in the White House. But 2005 will likely go down in history as the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency.

© 2005 Brattleboro Reformer