georgeob1 wrote: I agree, this is difficult to quantify. However in this matter I believe you are wrong in principle.
Well, as Winston Churchill once said, if two people agree with each other, one of them is superfluous. In this spirit, I'm happy to note that none of us is superfluous.
Meanwhile, I'm not so sure about the Republican Bubble not bursting. For example, I find it remarkable that The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page is getting increasingly unhappy with the Bush administration. It's nice to see that people like me are not alone in believing that Bush and friends have a major credibility and execution problem.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, its political editor John Harwood wrote:CAPITAL JOURNAL
By JOHN HARWOOD
Credibility of Bush
Becomes a Problem,
Mostly Self-Inflicted
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- The Democratic presidential primary competition has been getting almost as much exposure as Janet Jackson did during the Super Bowl. But John Kerry's failed bid to bury John Edwards's candidacy here isn't the most important Election 2004 story of the week.
Less noticed, but more consequential, is the gathering threat to President Bush's political standing. And just as with the nose-diving candidacy of Howard Dean, the problem is largely self-inflicted.
More than most presidents, Mr. Bush depends on assets that are personal. Americans like him more than his policies. What they like, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, is the idea that Mr. Bush is a strong leader, with capable advisers, who talks straight. Against the post-Clinton backdrop, his ineloquent speaking style became a strength, not a weakness.
But that image took its first hit this year from a fired cabinet officer. By complaining publicly that his dissent on tax cuts was smothered, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill called into question his own judgment for joining an administration plainly committed to them. But he also raised questions about Mr. Bush's leadership. Selecting a Treasury chief who disagrees with your centerpiece economic policy, then ignoring him, is a large blunder.
Just as that flap was subsiding, Mr. Bush opened himself to fresh attack. His State of the Union speech offered a chance -- from the position of strength that economic revival and Saddam Hussein's capture gave him -- to soberly address doubts about his fiscal policy and justification for war.
Instead, Mr. Bush adopted the stance of a partisan seeking to shift blame and start a fight -- on both sides of the aisle. Mr. Dean's screaming fit after the Iowa caucuses a day earlier got more TV airtime, but the president's speech is more likely to echo into November.
By calling on lawmakers to "cut wasteful spending and be wise with the taxpayers' money," he implicitly fingered the Republican-led Congress for mammoth deficits -- not the costly tax cuts, farm bill and Medicare prescription-drug benefit he signed. And by invoking evidence of "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities" in Iraq -- as opposed to actual weapons -- he improbably suggested that he had been vindicated, and his Democratic skeptics undercut, over the prewar danger Mr. Hussein's Iraq had posed.
This strategy left Mr. Bush vulnerable on two grounds. The first was the deepening misgivings that Mr. Bush already faced on Capitol Hill, from Republicans as well as Democrats, over both the deficit and Iraq. The second is the fact that both of Mr. Bush's lines of argument were susceptible to being discredited with the broader public. Which is precisely what now has happened.
When Mr. Bush was lobbying Congress to pass the Medicare bill and help him neutralize one of the Democrats' 2004 aces, he was unequivocal about the costs. "The budget I submitted earlier this year committed $400 billion over 10 years to implement this vision of a stronger Medicare system," he told an elderly audience in Orlando, Fla., less than three months ago. "This is enough to meet our commitments."
Last week, Mr. Bush's own budget office disclosed that $400 billion isn't enough -- by a long shot. And this week, the president who once declared "we can proceed with tax relief without fear of budget deficits" sent Congress a budget that's $521 billion in the red.
Even a cursory review of Mr. Bush's prewar rhetoric on Iraq long ago signaled a mismatch with postwar reality. His 2003 State of the Union, in addition to its since-retracted claim that Mr. Hussein sought uranium in Africa, told Americans the Iraqi dictator was "assembling the world's most dangerous weapons" and posing a threat to the U.S.
But when former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said he believed there were no such weapons -- that "we were all wrong" -- Mr. Bush's credibility took a direct hit.
It's no surprise that Mr. Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, calls Mr. Kay's public avowal "a devastating blow" to Mr. Bush. But a new Gallup survey showing declining presidential approval, and Messrs. Kerry and Edwards actually leading Mr. Bush, points to more than just a primary-season Democratic bounce.
Even harder to dismiss are complaints from Republicans such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska of "exaggerations" in the Bush administration's case for war. If the public comes to share that view, Mr. Hagel warns, "that would put the president in a very bad position. ... Do we trust his word? Do we trust him to lead this country? That's what this election will come down to."
That is a predicament that Bill Clinton, with his popular policies and golden tongue, might be able to talk himself out of. But it is an especially hazardous one for Mr. Bush.
