In an otherwise very interesting essay in the Village Voice, Rick Perlstein writes:
.... Meanwhile the president, who earned some 500,000 votes less than his opponent, busied himself ramming through a radical legislative program as if he had won by a landslide
The persistence of this meme on the American 'left' is astonishing. If Bush had governed in the bipartisan manner people wished him to, he would be winning election in a canter this time around. It's Bush's incompetence in pursuit of unreality that gives the Democrats a chance to win back the Presidency and maybe the Senate at a time when natural loyalty to the governing party in a time of threat would make Kerry the Thomas Dewey of the early 21st century.
Maybe. I wish I'd had a blog back to put this prediction on the web in 2001 because it was clear to me then that what was going to destroy the Bush administration was just plain incompetence.
Who knows? The scale of the incompetence has been multiplied by the extreme policies pursued, but perhaps it would have infected even a middling bipartisan set of policies.
Things must get worse before they get better!
Posted by robe0419 at October 21, 2004 3:16 PM