"BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD," Dr. Eville.
Posted on 11/17/2002 3:13:25 PM PST by Druidstl
Why Bush isn't happy about an all-GOP Congress By ROBERT B. REICH Featurewell.com 11/17/2002
President Bush must be worried. Why? Because he didn't want Republicans to control both houses of Congress. Like all first-term presidents, his biggest political goal is to be re-elected. A one-term presidency is considered a flop. Two terms and you get a chapter in the history books named after you. You get a decade named after you.
But now that Republicans are in control of both houses of Congress, the president will have less chance of being re-elected in 2004. It would be exactly the same, but in reverse, if a Democrat were in the White House. A Democratic president doesn't want to face re-election with a Democratic Congress.
Why not? For one thing, a Congress that's completely controlled by the same party as the president inevitably pushes that president toward that party's base, which is not where most of the votes are going to be found in the next presidential election.
A Republican-controlled Congress will push George W. Bush to the right. Its domestic agenda will be even more aggressively anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, pro-guns, more tax cuts for the wealthy, less regulation on big corporations.
And the president will have to go along. Or risk the wrath of his Republican conservative base. And if he goes along, he'll risk alienating voters in the vast middle - swing voters and independents he has to rely on if he's going to be re-elected.
Besides, an all-Republican Congress gives voters no one to blame when things go wrong other than Republicans, including, especially, the Republican-in-chief. And of course something's going to go wrong over the next two years.
When Democrats controlled at least one house, Republicans could blame them. A really dumb regulation? The Democrats pushed for it. An embarrassing leak to the press? The Democrats did it. A miscalculation on foreign policy? Democrats made it happen.
Besides, Americans like divided government. They like checks and balances. They'll be less likely to vote for a Republican president in 2004 now that Congress is already under the complete control of Republicans.
George W. Bush didn't need a Republican Congress to get done what he wanted to get done to be re-elected. He can't and won't do much about the economy. As for foreign policy, the president doesn't need Congress any more. He's already got his Iraqi war resolution. And as commander-in-chief, he has free rein to go after terrorism. Democrats aren't going to stop him.
Yes, the president campaigned like mad for Republican candidates. But that doesn't mean he wanted all of them to win. He wanted what any first-term president wants - to gain credit with party loyalists for having done what he could do, to show once again that he can raise a boat-load of money, to keep in his debt those congressional Republicans who did get re-elected and to show the public he's no slouch when it comes to aggressive campaigning. All important prerequisites for 2004.
So the president must be concerned. With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, the president's chances of re-election have dimmed.
ROBERT B. REICH served as secretary of labor under President Clinton and unsuccessfully sought the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Massachusetts.
"BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD," Dr. Eville.
The sad part here is that the people in the Clinton White-house sat around thinking of ways to position themselves so they wouldn't have to take action because they thought it would help them get elected. Bush is just the opposite, he wants to do the right thing to help the country and knew that he couldn't do that without a Republican Congress. They're confused because doing something simply because they think it's the right thing is utterly foreign to them.
ROFLMAOCB!!!! (can't breathe...)
You have got to be kidding me! My sister-in-law, while not being a koolaid-drinking clintonoid, really loves this guy, and thinks he is one of the brightest bulbs on this rock. She took one of his classes once upon a time. I still haven't seen a lot of evidence that he is anything but a typical liberal professor type, and they are a dime a dozen around here, and very few even know how to think at all.
Sorry, sir, but this President knows what he wants, and works to get it. If he didn't want Republican support, he would have been chopping wood at the ranch.
The Demodogs are pathetic now. It is amazing that they are so constitutionally incapable of figuring out what is going on. Only when they can attract less voters than the Greens and Libertarians will they realize the voters no longer want what they have been marketing with their dirty tactics so long. That comment is not meant to say I believe the war is over; only that the outcome is no longer in doubt.
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