Candace

Talmadge

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January 28, 2008

Bush’s State of the Union

Tonight George W. Bush gives his final State of the Union address.  According to a very recent Harris Interactive online poll, most of us (81 percent) think the state of this nation is only fair to poor.

The Harris online survey of 2,302 U.S. adults, conducted between Jan. 15 and 22, also found that 61 percent of Republicans think the country’s state is fair to poor. Even more ominous for GOP chances in November, 87 percent of those independent swing voters think the state of the nation is fair to poor.

Poor W. Where’s the love? Rightly or wrongly, U.S. presidents get more blame when the economy tanks than credit when it sizzles. And their affiliated political party tends to get clobbered in the next election if the public’s mood doesn’t improve. Can $600 per-person bribes draped in the “economic stimulus” fig leaf (if the House-White House deal survives the Senate) buy votes?

We won’t know the answer for some months. But one thing is fairly certain. When Bush 43 finally bows out of office next January, even a majority of Republicans will breathe a sigh of relief, although they may not be happy with his replacement.

The seeds of the Bush regime’s decline were, as usual, sowed in its triumph. Having been anointed for his first term in office by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush squeaked past John Kerry in the 2004 election and, with typical (if borrowed) Texas bravado, declared his a “landslide” victory that had racked up enormous political capital that he intended to spend on Capitol Hill.

Remember those heady days?

Bush then tried to sell Congress and the rest of us on privatizing Social Security, which, if reports are accurate, he has hated since his college days if not earlier. Alas for the president, his party and all those Wall Street greed-is-good Gordon Gekkos salivating at the prospect of billions in investment fees, the proposition was DOA. We the People told our elected representatives loud and clear not to mess with Social Security, and the GOP-controlled Congress got the Democrats’ same cold feet.

What? A chink in the Rovian armor? Impossible, the pundits declared. And the U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan just kept coming despite that “mission accomplished” banner. Guess the insurgents never got that memo.

A hapless tragic woman lying in a coma dealt a second blow to the Bushies in early 2005. Terri Schiavo was the subject of a family dispute that had played out for seven years in the Florida courts. The so-called defenders of states’ rights were so eager to violate them that the Republican majority in Congress rushed through federal legislation specific to the Schiavo case and Bush ran back from his Texas ranch to sign it.

Fortunately for our republic, federal judges correctly refused to intervene in the matter. Polls at the time showed 70 percent-plus of the public disapproved of the GOP’s actions. The entire farce finally opened a lot of people’s eyes to the Bushies’ undue deference to wannabe theocrats masquerading as defenders of the helpless.

It took a Category 4 hurricane named Katrina and the federal government’s bungled, indifferent response to it to deliver the deathblow to Bush’s popularity. From that point on (September 2005), W’s approval numbers collapsed and never recovered.

Many observers fear that the damage the Bush regime has done to the U.S. Constitution may not be reversed even with a different party in power. Who can tell at this stage? The prospect of any Democrat (especially Hillary Clinton) wielding the same type of secret, unconstitutional and unchecked powers may prompt even Republicans to call for a restoration of the checks and balances laid out in the Constitution.

We can only vote accordingly.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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