“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »
Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Senator John McCain is now riding high in the polls and in his cross-country image building trip: he can watch the two Democratic Presidential wannabes bloody themselves (and their party) up. But he faces a ticking time bomb in November: he’s running a campaign deferential to President George Bush when polls and historian rankings show Bush to be one of the most poorly-ranked in American history.
Bush’s poll numbers aren’t the lowest in history (yet) but he is so far down that he can see a sign that says SOUTH POLE and he needs to be careful of relief-seeking sniffing dogs.
Even worse worse in terms of the long view and his legacy, just look at this historians’ poll:
A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent.
An unscientific poll of professional historians completed the same week produced results far worse for a president clinging to the hope that history will someday take a kinder view of his presidency than does contemporary public opinion.
In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
Can it get yet worse? Yes:
Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.
Here in Florida, Hillary and McCain carried the day. Giuliani apparently is planning to drop out of the race and give the nod to McCain. And some conservatives ain’t happy, to put it mildly.
At The Corner, Michael Graham says, "Assuming there is no shocking revelation or health issue, the GOP nomination is over. Conservatives need to start practicing the phrase
"Nominee presumptive John McCa….." Sorry, I can’t say it. Not yet….. So it is over. Finished. In November, we’ll be sending out our most liberal, least trustworthy candidate vs. to take on Hillary Clinton—perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy." Hey, cheer up, Michael Graham: Obama might still get the nomination!
Kathryn Jean Lopez, whose love for Romney is legendary, is keeping the faith alive. “I’ll shut up after this post, but Romney has been ON since Michigan. It may prove — it may have been proven tonight — to be too late. But this guy speaking right now, is hitting important issues, making you feel good about America, as you should. It’s a rallying speech. Maybe it’s the silly flip-flopping thing that has been too hard to shake. Maybe he took too long to rise above it.”
Maybe. Podhoretz pooh-poohs "the ridiculous early analysis." "Mitt Romney has no reason to back off, even though he will have lost four of the five real contests so far. He’s worked successfully now to establish himself as the McCain alternative, and there appears to be enough anger and suspicion of McCain among Republicans to make a Romney win plausible if McCain does something to injure himself." He does foresee "increasingly agitated conservative rage radiating toward him from the radio speakers and a browser near you." I expect McCain—-if his momentum continues, which I’d say is far from a foregone conclusion—will survive. He’s been the target of it so often.
I don’t expect these particular Republicans to take this in, but McCain’s success indicates that moderate Republicans and right-tilting independents might be as sick as Democrats over where their party’s hard right turn has taken them. Maybe a lot of people who consider themselves “conservative” would like a return to a more Read the rest of this entry »
Unless Rudy Giuliani pulls off a Florida surprise in next Tuesday’s primary, there are now three Republicans with some chance of winning their party’s presidential nomination: John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. Recently, I speculated on who might be the vice presidential running mates of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the event that one of them becomes the Democratic nominee for president. But what about the remaining Republican contenders?
Each would have their own particular needs when it came to selecting running mates. In this post, I want to address what and who McCain will likely need in a running mate.
McCain should, by all rights, be the clear frontrunner, given the usual orderly succession of Republican presidential politics. That he isn’t results in part, from the fact that neoconservatism, with its advocacy of Wilsonian intervention in foreign affairs, has at least temporarily changed the definition of conservatism. Additionally, on at least two major issues–immigration reform and campaign financing–McCain has departed from conservatism. Some will also mention his opposition to President Bush’s 2002 tax cuts. Others will excoriate his participation in the Gang of Fourteen, ignoring how the compromise struck by those US Senators in 2005, made it possible for the President’s conservative nominees for the US Supreme Court to be confirmed without controversy.
Be that as it may, McCain, an orthodox Goldwater-Reagan conservative who is an advocate of strong national defense, restrained government spending, Second Amendment rights, and an end to abortion, doesn’t have the luxury that Ronald Reagan had in selecting running mates in 1976 and 1980. Read the rest of this entry »
Fred Thompson may be onto something. This week the New York Times puzzled over his “sleepy, unconventional” approach to pursuing the presidency, noting, “Indeed, what has defined his campaign recently has to a large degree been his absence from the trail.”
But the Senator/actor who got his start during the Nixon impeachment may be putting his experience to good use. After the trauma of an administration that tried to do too much, the country was ready for a vacant Oval Office or, failing that, an innocuous president like Gerald Ford and then a low-key Jimmy Carter, who was perplexed by the “national malaise.”
With the high-energy Rudy Giuliani imploding in scandals, laid-back Fred Thompson may be foxier than he seems. As an antidote to Bush’s imperial presidency, he may be showing voters how little he would do to make them anxious or fearful.
His ambling through primary states could be just the ticket for the times. Before the debate, he had a week with only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” in the back room of a Southern Carolina barbecue restaurant with no music, food or even chairs. A hundred voters stood for three hours before he arrived for a few remarks and half a dozen questions. Less than 30 minutes later, he left.
At the Florida state convention, other candidates blustered for half an hour or more. Thompson chatted for four minutes, leaving one supporter to say, “We were all hoping he would say something we could get behind, but there was nothing.”
Republicans, his campaign manager sums it up, will have decide whether they want “the Energizer Bunny or a consistent conservative.”
At this rate, if Fred Thompson gets the nomination, he may nod off during debates with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and doze all the way to the White House.
If voters want a restful President, he’s their man.
During his first term, George W. Bush was arguably the most successful party-building president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like FDR, who fashioned a Democratic coalition that dominated American politics for a generation, Bush during his first four years in office helped the Republicans post gains in Congress and around the country that many in the party viewed as the cornerstone for a similarly long-lived GOP majority.
But during his seemingly ill-starred second term, the Republicans have hemorrhaged seats up and down the ballot–losing their majorities in both houses of Congress, dropping hundreds of seats in the state legislatures, and giving up enough governorships to leave the GOP with less than half of them for the first time in more than a decade.
As a result, with barely a year to go in his administration, that part of Bush’s legacy–as a party builder par excellence–remains very much in question.
Over the course of his presidency, Bush has thrown himself into the role of party builder with gusto that few, if any, of his predecessors have matched. He has helped the GOP and its candidates raise tens of millions of dollars and he has stumped extensively for Republican candidates who tapped the White House for assistance.
Boosted by high approval ratings through much of his first term and with the Democrats on the defensive, Bush’s efforts to help his party initially paid off. In 2002, he became the first president since FDR in 1934 to see his party gain both House and Senate seats in his first midterm election.
In 2004, Republicans added more seats to their congressional majorities with Bush leading the GOP ticket. The Republican Senate total swelled to 55 seats and the GOP House total to 232, the highest post-election total for the party on the House side in nearly 60 years and equaling the GOP’s highest post-election total on the Senate side since the eve of the Great Depression in the late 1920s. A nation split 50-50 after the 2000 election looked after 2004 as though it was definitely leaning Republican.
