Writes Pat Buchanan:
“After losing control of the Senate and 30 House seats in 2006, the GOP is bracing for losses of six to nine in the Senate, and two dozen to three dozen additional seats in the House.
If the party “were a dog food,” says Rep. Tom Davis, “they would take us off the shelf.”
Bush’s approval is 25 percent. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton left office with ratings more than twice as high.
But while John McCain and others have deplored the Bush failures, what, exactly, did he do wrong?
What were the policy blunders to which Republicans vehemently objected at the time?
That Bush is a Big Government Republican is undeniable. His two great social spending initiatives, prescription drug benefits for seniors under Medicare and No Child Left Behind, so testify. But how many Republicans opposed Bush on these initiatives? How many have called for the abolition of either program, or for raising payroll taxes to pay for prescription drugs?
McCain now supports the Bush judges and justices and the Bush tax cuts, as do almost all Republicans.
True, Bush sought amnesty for illegal aliens and backs the free-trade globalism that exported our manufacturing base and 3 million to 4 million jobs. But McCain is even more enthusiastic about both.
Does the party dissent on free trade and mass immigration?
Two-thirds of Americans now believe the Iraq war a mistake. Yet, all but a few Republicans backed the war.
Yet, Republicans still believe that the war was not a mistake, only mishandled.
How many Republicans have repudiated the Bush Doctrine that got us into Iraq—the belief that only by making the world democratic can we keep America secure and free?
The GOP needs to confront the truth: The failure of the Bush presidency lies not in a failed execution of policy but in the policies themselves and the neoconservative ideology that informed them.”
One Comment
It comes as NO surprise about the war, but what really has amazed me all along was the GOP’s dismissal of the status of the economy.
Americans were and are losing jobs, livable wage jobs have gone overseas and are not coming back, and this has been going on in the Midwest for decades.
In Ohio, Taft taxed Ohioans when so many companies were leaving, and they never forgot that.
One commentator made the remark that Ohio hasn’t done well since 9/11. The job losses started well before that, and salaries and pay have not kept up with inflation and prices.
I believe the failure to address the job losses cost the Republicans in many ways, although Mitch Daniels was re-elected in Indiana. He did a good job there, and was working on bringing jobs to the state, however difficult.
The last election, with Bush and Kerry, had little discussion of jobs and the economy. It had to hit near rock bottom for anyone to address it, and now, it is going to be a hard climb uphill.
A true Patriot sees the issues, not the seduction of politics.