Imperiled nations instinctively turn to resolute leaders
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
It might not be that strange that former President George W. Bush’s revived reputation grows stronger as Barack Obama’s facade crumbles.
A recent poll in Illinois, Obama’s home state, found voters are less likely to vote for candidates endorsed by Obama by 40-26 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.
Re-enforcing that finding, the Journal’s columnist John Fund reported Bush has moved six points ahead of Obama in public acclaim in another reading by a Democrat pollster.
On Martha’s Vineyard, of all places, a store owner reports more current sales for the George W. Bush T-shirt asking, “Miss me yet?” than for a shirt proclaiming, “I vacationed with Obama,” of which 4,000 were sold in 2009.
The latest Rasmussen tracking poll out Monday shows only 25 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of Obama’s job performance compared with 45 percent who strongly disapprove, an index gap of negative 20 percent.
Signs, surveys, portents and actual recent election results in key venues where Obama’s reputation was on the line endorsing Democrats indicate the presidential coattails are shrinking, his multiple policy slips showing.
The coattails did nothing for Massachusetts Democrat Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley, wiped out by a heretofore little known GOP state senator, Scott Brown, as she and Obama tried to hold the so-called “Kennedy seat” in the U.S. Senate.
Republicans won over Obama-endorsed Democrats in governor races in New Jersey and Virginia.
All of which means Democrat candidates running in 2010 have reason for fright and explains why they are running for the hills to keep away from Obama.
But how to explain the George W. Bush comeback?
It might be Obama’s multiple leadership failures with spending, deficits, and billions in blown stimulus funds, which stimulated little beyond political contributions.
Bush, however, though a piker compared with Obama on budgets and deficits, was no spending slouch either. So cancel that out.
It might be Obama’s immigration policies compared with Bush’s. Obama has mainly gone through the motions, and little of that even, to appear interested in closing our border with Mexico to encroachment by illegal aliens and/or terrorists.
Border vigilance, however, was not Bush’s strong suit either. Another comparison that amounts to a wash.
The country is in a more conservative mood now that Obama’s pledge to fundamentally change America has come in focus on things like health care, energy policy and taxation.
Bush put up better marks for defending the Constitution by appointing justices such as John Roberts and Samuel Alito versus Obama choices of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan; the latter two likely to endorse Obama’s non-fixed legal standard, preposterous as it is, of “empathy” for whichever side a judge prefers.
You can name your own Obama vs. Bush benchmarks: Obama seemingly bent on dismantling America (see Thomas Sowell’s column elsewhere in these pages) or Charles Krauthammer’s (page 13, opposite this one) outlining Obama’s stark reversals on consecutive days over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.
This writer thinks, however, that something deeper is afoot with Bush’s comeback, something intuitive inside the collective American consciousness.
That is the menace of Iran — a reality Barack Obama seems not to want to comprehend or for inscrutable personal or political motives will not deal with.
Iran is a rogue nation, ruled by a mad Islamic tyrant backed by religious fanatic mullahs in Tehran.
We sense Bush would understand that Iran intends to unleash horrible things on the United States and that he would act.
Bush did act to confront a mad tyrant, Saddam Hussein.
Saddam might or might not have had atomic weapons. Whatever, but he was as open as his Iranian counterparts that he was going to get them and that he would use them to commit genocides, as he had done before.
Guiding our military, George Bush, helped by precious few allies, took out Saddam.
For that bit of resolve, we admire him, as others should. The Free World, which Barack Obama currently heads, indecisively we would add, can at least breathe easier for having one less homicidal megalomaniac to deal with.
Tony Blankley’s column (page 13 opposite this one) reminds readers of an earlier tragic failure of nerve, that being to stop Adolf Hitler before it cost 60 million lives on all sides in World War II.
August 27, 2010
