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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNobody in Iowa Wants to Talk About W.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/01/we-forgot-about-w/46906/Nobody in Iowa Wants to Talk About W.
Associated Press
Elspeth Reeve 12:36 PM ET
The Republican presidential primary has had plenty of discussion of the 1990s, but very little of the 2000s. The Associated Press' Beth Fouhy points out that the name of the last Republican in the White House is rarely mentioned, and when George W Bush's name does come up, it's jarring, as when an Iowa voter asked Ron Paul if she could really trust he'd stick to his foreign policy, given "a couple of presidents from Texas that said they weren't interested in wars ... like George W. Bush." Fouhy reports that many policies conservatives don't like -- the bank bailout, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Medicare prescription dug benefit -- were all Bush policies. But we still haven't gotten the chance to rehash all the stuff that happened in that controversial decade. Instead, we're still talking about the 1990s.
Presidential candidates have been talking about the 1990s for a long time. In 2003, the Democratic candidates running against a Republican incumbent brought up the last Democratic president's name all the time. "I agreed with Bill Clinton on most things," Dick Gephardt said. "In 1993, I was the majority leader who led with Bill Clinton to get this economy straightened out You remember? Twenty-three million new jobs in seven years. Unemployment was in 3 percent. We took a $5 trillion deficit and turned it into a $5 trillion surplus." John Kerry on trade: "The fact is that Bill Clinton was absolutely correct." John Edwards on foreign policy: "This president has completely disengaged in North Korea. If you watch what happened, the Clinton administration was actually engaged, making progress." But the previous president that gets mentioned most in the last year of debates is Clinton, like when Newt Gingrich tries to prove he can work with Democrats. Gingrich's candidacy has been a nostalgia tour of the 90s -- the fun things, like Gingrich's posing with Power Rangers, and the less fun things, like how Washington became so polarized and how the individual health care mandate got its start as a conservative idea in the early part of the decade.
Bush goes unmentioned even at the most obvious moments, like when Gingrich said he'd been "Romneyboated" by negative ads in Iowa. Gingrich was complaining about underhanded political attacks, implying that the "swift boating" of John Kerry for the benefit of George W. Bush was a terrible thing. And yet when John ONeill, head of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, defended himself to the National Review's Brian Bolduc, he didn't mention Bush at all. Instead, he talked about Gingrich's congressional record, saying he hasn't been a fan of Gingrich "ever since the debacle in the late 1990s, when he came close to squandering a Republican majority in the House and engaged personally in conduct that really hurt the Republican party."
We briefly talked about Bush when Rick Perry entered the race -- that Perry was everything that Bush aspired to be. But it turned out Americans prefer a fake cowboy who sometimes plays dumb to a real cowboy who, judging by his debate appearances and the testimony of many Texans, actually is dumb. But dissecting Bush's mannerisms is nowhere near as interesting as dissecting his legacy will be, whenever we get the chance to do it.
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Nobody in Iowa Wants to Talk About W. (Original Post)
babylonsister
Jan 2012
OP
But maybe, just maybe no one will remember what doing those things did to the country under bu$h
liberal N proud
Jan 2012
#4
liberal N proud
(60,334 posts)1. The GOP would like to forget that bu$h ever happened.
think
(11,641 posts)3. But they still want the same things W does. War , more war, and tax cuts.....
liberal N proud
(60,334 posts)4. But maybe, just maybe no one will remember what doing those things did to the country under bu$h
If you don't mention it people will forget and it will be eaiser to complete the mission of destroying the middle class.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)2. they've erased him from the history books
riverwalker
(8,694 posts)5. Our strategy
should be to wrap them in GWB like blue shrink wrap. Smear them with Bushco like peanut butter. Have W oozing and stinking from every pore like dead fish slime.
Easy to do, we have 8 years of transcripts, videos, photos, op-ed's all at our fingertips.
hughee99
(16,113 posts)7. I'm not sure running against * is a winning strategy.
There's been a Dem in office for 3 years now, running on how bad the repuke was for 8 years before that is going to make it sound a lot like there's no real plan for the future.
BeyondGeography
(39,374 posts)6. Running from your own recent past
Sounds like us in the 80s. The difference is Reagan was a successful ideologue who had re-created a new American reality, so we paid a higher price.