Candace
Talmadge
Read Candace's bio and previous columns
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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