In the September issue of Esquire,
Ron Reagan, the son of the fortieth President of the United States takes a hard look at George W. Bush, the son of the forty-first, and does not like what he sees. The highlights...
(Cross posted at Points West)
"This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy's critique of George W. Bush.
I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, 'but not this time.'"
An aside: Ron is not the only one! Within the last few days I have talked with two Americans who have voted Republican their entire lives.
My bosses husband, who backed Goldwater in '64 and Buchanan in '96, said to me on Sunday, "This boy is just plain stupid. I had no idea how stupid! I voted for him last time but I'm gonna go Democrat in November. At least just this once. We need a new start."
One of my partner's co-workers is having second thoughts about her 2000 vote for Bush. "He's lost all credibility with me," she said. "Not to mention losing it with the whold damn globe."
More from Ron...
Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.
The real--but elusive--prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News--the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House--told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden's name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam's Iraq became International Enemy Number One...in Mr. Bush's words, "a threat of unique urgency" to the most powerful nation on earth...Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
Then Reagan reams Bush over his domestic policies:
Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job--where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who've lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover's to post a net loss of jobs. This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children?
Amen! I don't know why this popular vote argument isn't made more often (God knows the Republicans would be making it had Al Gore assumed the presidency in the same fasion as Bush). As the loser of the national popular count by 540,000 votes, Mr. Bush should have scaled way back on his conservative agenda, staying on Clinton's course with the economy (no tax cuts) and setting aside his radical right social policies. Such moves would have indicated that he understood the election results. Memo to Karl Rove: THIS is why presidents who won the White House while losing the popular vote have never won a second term. Back to Reagan:
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation's history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don't trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?...
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.
I hear people like Ron Reagan or my bosses husband or my partner's co-worker and it leads me to feel as if there is an underlying current out there...something the polls aren't picking up on. Should Bush lose even a small percentage of his base - those voters who have voted Republican since they were old enough to walk into a voting booth - he is going to wake up on November 3rd facing a deep blue electoral map.