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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

What If You Gave A Rally And Nobody Came?

Bush immediately should invite every Republican Congressional incumbent and challenger to a White House pep talk. ~Deroy Murdock This would be excellent advice in most other years.  Two years ago it probably would have worked.  As it is, many of the incumbents do not want to be associated with Mr. Bush in any way (Steele […]

Bush immediately should invite every Republican Congressional incumbent and challenger to a White House pep talk. ~Deroy Murdock

This would be excellent advice in most other years.  Two years ago it probably would have worked.  As it is, many of the incumbents do not want to be associated with Mr. Bush in any way (Steele desperately avoids the label of Republican, and John Hostettler in the Bloody Eighth refuses to allow Bush to set foot in his district, among others who are Bushophobic right now), much less be seen running off to Washington to receive their marching orders.  For Mr. Bush to lead the offense assumes that he is the quarterback, so to speak, that the other players want to follow.  They have to want to be proud that they are playing on Bush’s team for this to work, and right now many are doing their best to stress just how often they ignore his play calls.  But besides the political touch of death that Mr. Bush brings to many incumbents running right now, consider Mr. Murdock’s appeal for victory. 

It is, when you get down to it, not too different from “it’s the economy, stupid”: look at the low unemployment and the booming stock market!  They could channel Dick Cheney: “What more do you people want?”  Try that one in Ohio, and you are liable to get pelted with stones or, better yet, pieces of metal taken from the shuttered factories closed down in the shining age of globalisation.  Then comes the rah-rah on the war and the promise that “our firm hand will crush the terrorists.”  How’s that firm hand been doing in Iraq lately?  Oh, right, that one is also a losing issue across the country.  These are inevitably the dominant issues in this election, and the GOP actually does not fare well on either of them.  They can campaign on the estate tax and the AMT if they like, but anything they say on this will be made less credible by the gaping deficits they have created and will in any case not make up for the perception of their gross mismanagement and corruption.

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