President Bush Scares Democrats to Life for 2006 Elections (4/14/06)
by Dean Hartwell
Many Democrats believe that the Republican scandals, the Iraq quagmire and President Bush’s low poll numbers spell a Democratic victory in this year’s mid-term elections. But they are wrong. If the Democrats are to win, they are going to have to see the political world in a new way.
Cashing in on the GOP’s so-called “culture of corruption” simply isn’t enough. Sure, Democrats can blame the Republicans for the scandals involving
Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Scooter Libby and others, but the voters will not buy it. Democrats get involved in scandals, too, and corruption is not a partisan issue.
The Abramoff scandal, in particular, is the symptom of one party dominating Congress for a long period of time (twelve years). But, voters can surely remember that the Democrats recently had control of the House of Representatives for forty straight years.
Should the Democrats pursue the issue of President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping, they’ll run into another wall. The public is evenly split in supporting and opposing the President’s actions on this one. Republican voters back the President heavily and see the wiretapping as an extension of the War on Terrorism. They are not about to swing over and vote Democratic just because some civil libertarians are upset.
And the Democrats won’t get very far opposing Bush’s war policies, either. The voters have not forgotten that most Congressional Democrats supported the war to begin with. Plus, Democrats lack unity in deciding how to oppose the war. Some want to pull our troops out right away, while others want to phase troop reduction or even stay the course.
So, what can the Democrats do to win back the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate? They could focus on the one way that President Bush has devastated the Democrats in the last two elections. He has convinced the voters to view the rest of the world with fear. In 2002, Bush pressured the Congress to hold the vote for the authorization of the use of force a few weeks before the election, saying that we needed a “vote for peace.” In 2004, Bush stubbornly defended his decision to go to war with Iraq, saying that he was a “wartime president.”
In fact, throughout his presidency, Bush has maintained that a number of his actions were justified because of the War on Terrorism, like the Patriot Act. He has claimed that September 11 changed everything and that this new worldview justified striking Iraq though they were not a threat to us. And the voters were simply too scared to say no to these tactics.
It is time for the Democratic Party to encourage voters to stop feeling scared. This Administration has told us who the enemies are, from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein to terrorists. Yet they have offered little proof of why we should be afraid of them. Bush promised us proof that bin Laden was involved in September 11 shortly after the attacks but has never delivered it. He also failed to convince Afghanistan to extradite bin Laden because they did not see any proof that he had acted. And we now know Hussein did not pose a threat to our nation.
The legacy of the Bush presidency will be the planes flying into the World Trade Center towers. It is as if the President has told us that all that stands in the way of innocent people like us getting killed is him. Like a slave master, he tells us not to bite the hand that feeds us our security and protection from the cruel world around us.
We hold the keys to our own cages. Democrats could unlock themselves from minority status by selecting a few key issues that revolve around what people need. They should promise health care, environmental protection and low costs for medical prescriptions. People need to maintain their well-being so they can think clearly when others try to scare them.