It would be facinating to watch if the wheels really came off the current US administration. This was slipped in the Toronto Star‘s article on Kerry’s wins yesterday:
One national poll yesterday put Kerry seven percentage points ahead of Bush as the president continued to be battered by the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq and his secretary of state seemed to express second thoughts about the decision to go to war. Perhaps more ominous for the sitting president, his approval rating had dropped to 48 per cent, the lowest of his presidency, according to the CNN-USA Today poll.
I would think that sending soldiers to a war which has had its primary ground – WMD – generally disproven is a biggie. [Apparently Colin Powell thinks so, too.] It feels like there was never a true buy-in to the Saddam-Osammy link. And the tighter security rules must discomfort – I don’t think this is a big thing at the border and security agencies will be security agencies but when you are checking up on what my kids take out from the library it gets a bit weird. But the main thing is the messed up budget. I don’t think you can have 20 years of being told that you must reduce government spending and reduce taxes only to have the shift to big spending and low taxes bought by the people. It used to be said of conservatives that they shifted the tax from rich to poor. This guy shifts it to no one…but money does not work that way. The loans from the Saudis and China mount. Who wants that dependency mounting?
The real question is, all in all, what has George Jr. done uniquely that another leader would not have done? I am not convinced the war on terror (remember that one?) would not have been taken on by anyone in the White House after 9/11. Others might have pursued it more diligently. Others soon might.