In 2019, we will look back at ghostly footage of Bush stumbling through press conferences and Dick Cheney telling people the war in Iraq is going well, and wonder how it happened

Watching the presidential election unfold last year, I had a recurring premonition. I could not go to a Kerry rally without seeing it as old newsreel footage, watched with wonderment a few years hence. In much the same way that we now look back on the doomed campaigns of Walter Mondale, say, or Jack Kemp (in 1984 and 1996), so the frantic efforts of John Kerry would come to be seen as uselessly expended energy in a venture that once held so much promise and such hope.

And so it proved. I find myself looking back on George W Bush and his team from the perspective of, say, 2019. It will, I have decided, be rather like watching the events of three decades ago now. But instead of seeing Richard Nixon, his preposterous daughters and the wretched Spiro Agnew, these images will morph into equally ghostly film of Bush stumbling his way through press conferences, of his currently 23-year-old twin daughters fooling around, and of Dick Cheney telling the American people out of the side of his mouth how well the war in Iraq is going. And we will wonder how on earth it could all have happened.

I should say that in the past few days we have been able to add some startling new footage to these archives - showing, I believe, a growing link between Bush's big-money ethos and the corruption it spawned. From 20 June, for example, we have pictures of a lady called Lea Fastow leaving prison in Texas after serving time for tax offences; her husband, Andrew, will soon go to prison for a decade.

That same day we saw an 80-year-old man called John Rigas being sentenced to 15 years on 18 counts of conspiracy, bank fraud and security fraud in a $2.3bn (£1.3bn) swindle. Or we could choose to watch 58-year-old Dennis Kozlowski entering court. He was a Bushite hero when he ransacked $70m from his company in 2002 alone. It is likely that when we look back on this footage in 2019, he will still be in his cell (not in some cushy, low-security one, either, because he has been told he will be incarcerated in New York State's dreaded Attica prison).

In the early years of the Bush presidency, these people were held up as exemplars: if only we worked as hard. Now the long hand of the law is beginning to catch up with many of the corporate cronies who connived and defrauded their way towards huge riches in the first term: the Fastows because Andrew was the chief financial officer of Enron, Kozlowski after he was found to have stolen $150m from the company he founded, Tyco, and Rigas because he and his son "borrowed" $2bn from Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable companies in the US, which they ran until it collapsed in 2002.

We learned in these trials of the carefree excesses and the deceptions of the early Bush years: how Rigas sent Christmas trees to his relatives by plane and had 17 company cars, or how he spent $26m of company money to buy 3,600 acres of forest so that he could preserve the view from his house in Pennsylvania. Kozlowski paid $6,000 for a shower curtain and spent $2m on his wife's birthday party. Fastow, we now know, received only ten years in prison because he agreed to testify against one-time colleagues in the trial of Enron's former chief executive Ken Lay, known to George W Bush as "Kenny Boy".

It is these Enron trials, past and future, that posterity will see as summing up the Bush presidency. Enron was by far the biggest contributor to the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. Lay flew Bush senior and his wife to their son's inauguration in an Enron jet, but three years later was taken away in handcuffs by the FBI and indicted on 11 charges of fraud. From letters obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, we now know that Governor George W Bush wrote to his chum at Enron: "One of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older - just like you! Fifty-five years old. Wow. That's really old."

Now, characteristically, Bush is claiming that Lay was never an old or a close friend. Cheney is refusing to discuss the role played by Enron in the administration's energy plan; all that is known is that he held at least six meetings with the firm, behind closed doors, during the early days of Bush's presidency in 2001, when US energy policy was devised in a way that just happened to be in the interests of an energy conglomerate called Enron.

We now look back on Nixon sweatily insisting that he was not a crook with the kind of disbelief we feel when we have been conned. Will we, I wonder, see archive footage of Bush and the likes of Lay - when, for example, Lay likens early investigations of Enron's finances to the 11 September terrorist attacks - in the same way? The corporate swindlers who played such a telling role in the ascendancy of George W Bush have started to fall like flies this month; and their downfall, I suspect, will seem sadly symbolic of the Bush administration when we sit down to watch that old film in 2019.

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