Locomotive Mule

If you think about George W. Bush as CEO of America, Inc., it becomes clearer why his poll numbers have been so low (low to mid forties) in the run up to the election. No president with those kinds of poll numbers in the spring before the election has ever won.

Bush’s basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses.

Let us imagine you had a corporation with annual gross revenues of about $2 trillion. And let’s say that in 2000, it had profits of $150 billion. So you bring in a new CEO, and within four years, the profit falls to zero and then the company goes into the red to the tune of over $400 billion per year. You’re on the Board of Directors and the CEO’s term is up for renewal. Do you vote to keep him in? That’s what Bush did to the US government. He took it from surpluses to deep in the red. We are all paying interest on the unprecedented $400 billion per year in deficits (a deficit is just a loan), and our grandchildren will be paying the interest in all likelihood.

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President Bush’s campaign won’t say for sure whether he will agree to the three debates proposed by the independent Commission on Presidential Debates, or if a Republican strategist was right this week when he said the Bush campaign would agree to only two debates.

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I was recently thinking that the people deciding who the debate moderators would be, held an unusual amount of influence on this election. The type and content of the questions could make or break either contestant.
But that idea assumes that debates will actually take place.

GOP strategist Scott Reed was quoted by the Reuter news agency this week as saying the Bush camp’s position is that “two debates are sufficient and will not dominate the entire fall schedule.”

“Three debates would have a tendency to be a little overbearing on your campaign strategy and tactics,” Reed was quoted as saying.

On Thursday, after Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman visited a breakfast of the Arizona delegation to the Republican National Convention here, he refused to elaborate when asked whether that was the Bush campaign’s position.

“Debates are always very important,” Mehlman said.

But will Bush agree to all three of the commission dates, including the one in Arizona?

“We’ll see,” he said.

“Faint-hearted self-indulgence will put at risk all we care about in this world,” Miller said. “In this hour of danger, our president has had the courage to stand up. And this Democrat is proud to stand up with him.” – Zell Miller, RNC Keynote Speech

But this President does not have the courage to stand behind his party’s keynote speaker:

After gauging the harsh reaction from Democrats and Republicans alike to Sen. Zell Miller’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign — led by the first lady — backed away Thursday from Miller’s savage attack on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, insisting that the estranged Democrat was speaking only for himself.

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