Oedipus Bush? Slate's Jacob Weisberg Puts President on Couch

Political realists may find it reductive or even absurd to paint the failure of a U.S. presidency as the consequence of a son's unresolved relationship with his father.

Yet the approach was good enough for William Shakespeare, as Jacob Weisberg argues in "The Bush Tragedy,'' an unexpectedly compelling piece of armchair psychoanalysis.

"The term 'competition' doesn't begin to do justice to the Oedipal complexities of this particular relationship,'' Weisberg writes. "George W. Bush has been driven since childhood by a need to differentiate himself from his father, to challenge, surpass and overcome him. Accompanying those motives have been their precise opposites, expressed through a lifelong effort to follow, copy and honor his father.''