Not exactly what voters bargained for

June 7, 2005

The LA Times’ Janet Hook recently reported that Bush run for a second term on a specific policy agenda.

Many of the assets Bush brings to his second term distinguish him from other two-term presidents. Unlike President Reagan’s broad-brush “Morning in America” campaign for reelection in 1984, for example, Bush ran in 2004 on a specific agenda of new issues, notably overhauling Social Security and the tax code.

One wonders if we were all watching the same campaign. Bush created 64 television ads during the 2004 campaign, and not one mentioned Social Security or proposed changes to the tax code. Bush’s standard stump speech was nearly 4,000 words long — 77 of which dealt in passing with his approach to Social Security in the vaguest and most ambiguous way possible, and none of which referenced overhauling federal taxes. When BC04 released a 26-page “Agenda for America” booklet over the summer, there were just 33 words on “voluntary personal retirement accounts” — and no specific details about the president’s approach — hidden deep within the document.

As Josh Marshall recently noted, the entire Bush campaign stood on two planks: strength against terrorism and the flaws of John Kerry. Voters ultimately backed the incumbent because they thought he’d do a better job keeping them safe. The Bush gang, however, interpreted the vote as a mandate for everything on the president’s wish list, especially privatization of Social Security and stacking the federal judiciary.

Is the public getting what it expected? The results are becoming increasingly obvious.

A clear majority of Americans say President Bush is ignoring the public’s concerns and instead has become distracted by issues that most people say they care little about, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 58 percent of those interviewed said Bush is concentrating mainly in his second term on problems and partisan squabbles that these respondents said were unimportant to them. Four in 10 — 41 percent — said the president was focused on important problems — a double-digit drop from three years ago. […]

Ominously for Bush and the Republicans, a strong majority of self-described political independents — 68 percent — say they disagreed with the president’s priorities.

Ultimately, 52% disapprove of the job Bush is doing overall, the highest disapproval rate in more than 75 ABC/Post polls since his presidency began. On Iraq, 58% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war, matching his career-high Iraq disapproval mark.

I don’t know Janet Hook from Eve in the Garden of Eden, but it sure seems she has taken the lazy way out, choosing Bush’s press releases and GOP talking points (“elections have consequences,” “there was an accountability moment,” and “I have political capital to do what I told the American people I would do,” yada, yada, yada) INSTEAD of doing just a little bit of internet googling to get real facts.

I’ll bet, Mr. Carpetbagger, that you had to do some serious Bush-like “hard work” to get the info for this post; it took you a long time, too, like maybe five minutes (including writing and uploading it)! Damn lazy liberal media.

  • it took you a long time, too, like maybe five minutes

    Well, maybe six.

  • The sad fact is that I don’t think this Administration will ever get that they never had a mandate. I seriously think they are not only denying their troubles, I think they don’t really feel them. I think they use other excuses as a way to avoid admitting that things aren’t going well. Frankly, that makes me more scared because it is indicative of their obsessive insularity.

  • Sorry, but this is just incorrect. As I pointed out at my blog last Saturday, Bush IS pushing the agenda that he ran on. But it’s not the specific agenda he’s going for now. His platform was that he could do and say anything he wanted to, and nobody could stop him. Basically, it was an agenda of flim-flam and non-accountability. And that’s exactly what he’s trying to do now.

    So it’s not that he’s pushing an agenda that he didn’t run on. It’s that his agenda was just plain wrong.

  • ET – While I agree that this administration is very insular, I think you’re mistaken about their belief in the mandate. They didn’t really believe they had a mandate. But they did believe that if they acted as if they had a mandate, they could create one. It’s all part of their faith-based self-fulfilling prophesies. They believe that they can make things come true by pretending that they’re true. And the way our modern media works, that’s about half right. The media had already granted them their make-believe mandate, but even that wasn’t enough to overcome Bush’s poisonous agenda.

    Fortunately, they’ve over-estimated their ability to make turds look like diamonds; and they’re now seeing limits to their powers. But they’ll never give it up. Propaganda and false-confidence is all they’ve got going for them. And that ties back into the obsessive insularity you speak of. They can only live in fantasyland as long as they all believe. But the longer they stay in fantasyland, the less able they are to do with real problems.

  • How much do you think Bush cares about whether his polls are up or down now that he’s in his second term? Rhetorical question. The selfish entitled bratboy couldn’t care less, especially since he’s got his hand-picked true believers to stroke him regularly. Thing is, if his handlers continue to govern as if they couldn’t give a damn about their countrymen/women, and since Repubs in Congress are so into the lockstep action, it’ll make it tough for any Congressional Repub to step up in 2008 and claim to be someone better. That’s the possible silver lining, I’m addicted to grasping at straws since Nov. 2004.

  • The emerging “coingate” and the rest of the Ohio Workers Comp Bureau’s investment scandal could put a nail in W’s coffin on the Social Security privatization fiasco if the Dems trot this out into the open. In the memo given to Ohio’s guv about what’s happening with the workers comp fund investments, the program’s administrator wrote, ” because the managers leveraged the fund beyond contractual risk parameters, the $255 million investement had no value at the end of September.” Score one for investing in the private sector.

    Social Security should be renamed “Social Risk” and then maybe folks would get the point of what the privatization gag is all about. The only folks that are guaranteed to benefit are Wall Street and the cat food industry.

  • If it’s in private accounts, it’s not social.

    If it’s in the stock market (or, um, coins), it’s not secure.

    It’s “Anti-Social Insecurity”.

  • Politics 101 points as regards the observations that Bush is or is not doing what he gave alot or a little word play to during his campaign:
    1. All politicians running for president are trying to get as many people as possible under their tent without going to far in annying or alienating their base- so they can get the votes to win. This is why some Republicans take funds from “Log Cabin Republicans” (gay Republicans) and John Kerry goes on gun-toting duck hunting trips, showing off his new shotgun, or George Bush speaks spanish in sun belt states any time he gets the chance. They also are careful to not say anything too “experimental” to the crowds. They all do it.

    2. Bush was harping on national security and terrorism so much because at that time there was still a long way to go in the war (not just Iraq) on terrorism. Things have much improved since that time, and thus allowing the administration to shift focus to other things. Bush is also someone, despite all your criticism, who has really opened the door to allowing outsiders of the Washington Belt to give advice on a wide range of topics. Alternative fuel research and investigation into alternative national taxation methods are just a couple. And for all you national healthcare socialist out there, never forget that he delivered what Democrats always gave lip service to for decades, but never delivered: the budget busting prescription drug benefit to medicare.

  • “President Lindsey”-
    I grant you, GW is definately of the so-called American Blue Bloods- families with a long history of high society ties, wealth, power, etc. But if Bush is a “selfish entitled bratboy” then so is Kerry and Gore. It kills me how so many Democrats (perhaps not all) played all this shuck and jive image crap during the campaigns of 2000 and 2004 when their candidates were every bit as entitled, spoiled, rich and elite as Bush was. Never in my life have I seen two candidates such as Kerry and Bush have virtually the same raising and career path. Both born to highbrow New England families, both went to elite prep schools, both went to Yale, became Skull and Bones Members, both were mediocre students with good people skills, both became military officers, both have been wealthy thoughout there lives and have no clue what it is to rummage through all your clothes, couches, etc. looking for enough change to put a couple of gallons of gas into your car so you can get to work and slave away in the hot sun putting rooves on houses (hmm, I’m straying too personal). Don’t even get me started on Gore, the senator’s son. So cut this populist, class- warfare crap. I’d love to have a candidate who has known what it is to have been a normal guy (like most of us folks talking on this site) and faced our trials of life, but lets face it, it rarely happens these days on either side. Reagan was the last Republican of this mold, Clinton the last Democrat, and I don’t see any on the horizon from either side.

  • Surely the rich and powerful have occupied the Oval Office much more consistently over the years than self-made men, yet some of them have used their power to the betterment of avarage Americans, while others have fed the wealthy at the expense of all the rest of us. FDR was born to wealth but did more for the poor and middle class than most. And I hate to sound like I’m generalizing, but I think the history of this century bears out the contention that the rich Republican guys (and Reagan too, for that matter) have tended to be the party of the rich and for the rich, while the Dems have proven to be considerably more evenhanded. Bush is just an extreme example of the worst of the bunch, working to dismantle whatever social safety net is left. So yes, I would gladly have taken Gore or Kerry over Bush, any day of the week, though if I had my druthers I’d have chosen differently.

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