If you're a Democratic Presidential candidate, you're reaching for your Tums this morning.
- Jack Cafferty
So now Shrub has avenged his Daddy's embarrassing handling of Gulf War I. Now that the shooting has stopped and the knee-jerk flag-waving is beginning to ebb, the real work begins. It will be interesting to see what happens once Shrub realizes that he need to begin paying attention to domestic issues once again.
President Bush has emerged from the conflict in Iraq with his credentials as a wartime leader enhanced, but the outcome has done little to improve perceptions of how he is handling the economy and other domestic issues, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows.
Bush has benefited far less from the successful outcome in Iraq than his father, former president George H.W. Bush, did from the U.S. victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, largely because the country remains polarized over the younger Bush's presidency, according to measures in the latest poll that tracked questions asked 12 years ago.
That means Bush does not have as far to fall to find himself in the same kind of jeopardy over the economy that helped defeat his father in 1992. But offsetting that is evidence in the poll that Americans are less pessimistic about the economy and the state of the country today than they were when his father was facing reelection -- and that the war on terrorism will not fade as an issue in the way the Gulf War did after it ended.
The 2004 campaign is about to begin. Of course, the Democrats are trying to keep up with the Republicans in the equivalent of an orange 1974 AMC Pacer with one brown door and three bald tired. It's entirely possible that Shrub may win re-election almost by default. If the Democrats cannot pull their collective anterior out of their collective posterior, Shrub may not have to resort to stealing the 2004 election.
At this point, the Shrub Administration clearly controls it's own destiny. If they can grasp the reality of "It's the economy, stupid!" and devote the same energy to the economy that they have to waging war on Iraq, I pity the poor sacrificial Democrat.
Of course, there is another reality at work here. The country is still polarized over the effectiveness of Shrub as President. There are those who think that, as a leader, he is without parallel. There are also those, among which I'd include myself, who think the man is President only because his last name is Bush and he has no ethical problem with stealing an election. The truth, of course, is likely somewhere in between. For now, the reality is that regardless of whether Shrub is an idiot or an idiot savant, he IS President. November 2004 is still a long ways away.
