August of 2003 was a horrifying time politically, markedly worse than the present in terms of human consequences.
In just a few years we had gone from a time of peace and record prosperity with an exceptionally eloquent centrist president who had won two landslides to a time of war by choice and recession with an astonishingly inarticulate and ignorant extreme-right president who had stolen office and was laying waste to just about every progressive priority (and democratic principle) in sight, with barely a peep from the mainstream media about this dark turn of events.
Though any honest and informed person now recognizes that Bush was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, he had high approval ratings at the time. Ironically, though he had helped enable 9/11 by ignoring reams of intelligence warnings, the public rallied around Bush after the event because they wanted a father figure and the mainstream media had failed to report on his gross negligence. Iraq hadn't spun out of control yet, Katrina hadn't happened, the crash of 2008 was several years in the future, so Bush's stock was high.
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean was the flavor of the moment because he was the first candidate to forcefully--angrily, even--give voice to the feelings of Democratic activists and politically-literate voters who understood just how destructive Bush's presidency was. Right behind him in the polls were John Kerry and John Edwards, who would end up as the presidential and vice presidential candidates on the Democratic ticket. Ultimately, thanks to all of the GOP's breathtakingly cynical maneuvers to suppress the vote in Ohio, this ended up being the most prescient sentence in the feature:
There is a small (but growing) body of Democrats who calibrate the degree of difficulty in unseating Bush and come to the conclusion that none of the current candidates is up to task.
No comments:
Post a Comment