I loved this one from Bush's resume:
"Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market."
In one item, the writer manages to blame Bush for the mania market and 9/11 - and also gives the facts a hefty nudge. It's similar to the repeated use of the term "bankrupt" - as in, "bankrupted the US treasury" - likewise betraying either willful or abject ignorance of economics and history.
It's hard for me to believe that any of you, as traders - even the most implacably anti-Bush of you - really believes that the bear market is really all, or even very significantly, Bush's fault. If you do, you probably find it easy to believe that the Bush Administration should have solved the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda in the several months it had prior to 9/11 - and even though the Clinton Administration couldn't do so in several years. No doubt, you also believe that the economy in the '90s turned on a dime the day Clinton was sworn in - or maybe the day that Congress passed his first budget.
Read with any understanding, the resume as a whole actually makes a powerful case for Bush - who came into office with little foreign policy experience, under highly controversial and contentious circumstances, and in face of a collapsing stock market and recessionary economy, and then had to meet the worst attack on American territory at least since Pearl Harbor. Since that time, he's led a highly effective response, at least in the judgment of the vast majority of Americans, despite massive opposition.
Of course, to Bush-haters, the record is "attacked and took over two countries." It's every Republican's fondest wish that the Democratic presidential candidate takes a message like that one to the electorate next year, and that he or she places himself firmly on the side of French diplomacy and the rights of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein to have carried on as they liked, entirely unmolested. If Bush is really lucky, the Democrat will join this foreign policy message to an emphasis on raising taxes in a slow-growth economic environment - and maybe the candidate or surrogates can throw in the kind of personal attacks and invective that they would have strongly protested when used against the Clintons.
Presidents and presidential candidates are hostages to fate, and a lot could happen over the next year and a half that could make Bush appear either highly vulnerable or virtually unbeatable - even against a Democrat who, unlike the current group as far as I can tell, possessed a popular, practical, and progressive vision. Right now, Bush 43 looks more like Reagan than Bush 41. Unless and until that changes, he will continue to drive Democrats crazy, continue to receive excessively insulting and completely irrelevant criticism from hacks and wanna-be hacks, and continue to gain in the estimation of most Americans - on the way to a landslide re-election.
