I think the statement above has a great deal of merit.
I voted for Bush twice in 2000, in the primary and the general. In '96 I voted for Keyes and then Dole. In '92, I voted for Buchanan (I think) and then Bush the Elder. I don't regret any of those votes, though I'd never vote for Buchanan or Keyes again, they're no longer even serious enough candidates for a primary vote.
Does that leave my re-election vote in the bag, no matter what Bush might do? No.
If the election was held today, I'd don a tight pair of noseplugs and vote for Bush with some heavy reservations. The "what about Gore/Hillary/etc." argument isn't especially persuasive. Trotting out the boogeyman to keep me in line no matter what Bush might do doesn't win my vote. The President needs to do that on his own merits.
Does that make me unappeasable? I don't think so. I'd been a straight line libertarian during the 80s, but got tired of that and eventually registered GOP in the early 90s. Even so, I totally surprised myself voting for Bush the Elder in 1992. Perot and Clinton just turned my stomach for any other alternative to be feasible.
Yet I can't join those in this forum who blame Perot voters for Clinton. George HW Bush took those votes for granted, and acted in ways that lost his majority from 1988. He has no one to blame but himself. Politicians serve at our pleasure, and our franchise is not their birthright.
George W. Bush starts out the 2004 campaign with a half-million vote deficit. The votes he got in 2000 are his "base." He barely eked out an Electoral College victory with but dozens of votes to spare. Maybe his new poll numbers will hold until 2004, maybe they won't. But if he alienates enough voters that he loses in 2004, then like his father, he'll have no one to blame but himself for his loss.
Many of us in this forum who protest loudly a number of Bush's recent actions are doing so to prevent such an erosion of his base and a potentially disastrous loss in 2004. But if the President knows our votes are in the bag, he has every reason to ignore us, just as he will if he knows we'd never vote for him. As the election nears, politicians only focus on getting out their base and winning the votes in play.
The best scenario possible is that Bush governs as we'd like and wins re-election. I'll take a certain amount of compromise in governance, but I don't like some of the trends. Where the conservative agenda can't realitically be advanced, the line must at least be held. Yet I see too much incrementalism in favor of the Left's agendas, where holding the line holds little risk. Thus my uneasiness.
So for now, I've determined I'm a Bush-leaning swing voter. And I won't cut him any slack
