Reality check

As I listen to President Bush’s campaign stump speech, I can’t help but think he, not Ronald Reagan, is the actor. The president is as slow on his feet than any president in recent memory, but when it comes to delivering a rousing speech, there have been few better.

After listening to him, you would think that we are actually making progress on the issues that plague our nation to include the war in Iraq, unemployed workers, wage deflation, health-care coverage, pensions and a general sense of anxiety born out of the notion that the next shoe could drop tomorrow.

Take the president’s domestic agenda, or lack thereof. One might think his presidency has had a bold vision for reshaping America. He talks about health-care credits for small business, job training and tax reform. Yet his administration’s budget through 2006, which was recently released by the Office of Management and Budget, indicates that money for programs benefitting our workforce has actually been cut. Tax reform is a figment of the president’s imagination.

Dick Cheney told a group of voters, when pressed for the details of the president’s tax reform plan, said there was nothing on paper, but these were good ideas. Meanwhile, corporate America took over $1.5 billion in profits offshore last year thanks to a shell game that benefits the president’s favorite donors.

Health care? The only thing the Bush administration has done on this front is guarantee that the taxpayers will keep his pals in the pharmaceutical industry in private jets with a Medicare prescription-drug benefit that costs hundreds of millions of dollars more than he told Congress it would when they passed it. I call this Bush math.

It also works for troops projections needed for going to war and the costs of war. Just move the zeros a few places and – voila! – it all sounds great when you are selling something. Once Congress buys it, then move the zeros back the other way. Perhaps the president can get a job with Enron’s new accounting firm next year.

Bush’s foreign policy is even worse. Make no mistake, the crown jewel of this presidency is the war in Iraq. This is the one and only alternative policy initiative this administration has taken on with total commitment. Despite the president’s campaign speeches to the contrary, there is no link – I will say it again, NO LINK – between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, 2001. There are no weapons of mass destruction. Now the president’s chief weapons inspector tells us Saddam had ideas to acquire and create weapons of mass destruction. Yes, these are perhaps like President Bush’s ideas for health care coverage or job training, or tax reform.

We are losing the war in Iraq. President Bush infers that Sen. Kerry is a traitor for saying this. What is the president’s plan for Iraq? President Bush says we need to stay the course. To stay the course is to continue to lose a thousand or more troops next year and permanently disable another 7,000. To stay the course is to have 100 more foreign kidnappings next year, and to lose another 26,000 Iraqi civilians. To stay the course is to have 36 more towns and cities in Iraq fall to insurgents. The president has had a report on his desk since July that clearly outlines the mess that is Iraq, his crown jewel. It states, at best, Iraq will enjoy a marginal state of security and, at worst, it will fall into total civil war. Staying the course, Mr. President, is not an option.

Meanwhile, intelligence reports indicate that al-Qaida is morphing itself into a giant network that spans the globe. We knew where they were and we sent in less troops to crush them than there were on the actual streets during the Republican National Convention in New York. Al-Qaida’s Taliban friends have resurged to the extent that our man Karzai has his own little green zone in Kabul for fear of being assassinated. He can’t even trust his own people to guard him. His security is provided courtesy of the good ol’ USA.

So if the state of Bush’s union is so dismal, why is it that not one poll indicates John Kerry will beat him? This is a great question. We have a president who hid in Texas and Alabama during the war of his generation and now he has started a war for this generation. He talks tough to a nation that still wants to kick someone’s backside in the wake of Sept. 11, while his opponent, a man who actually fought and was wounded and decorated for valor in war, is characterized as a waffling sissy. It’s politics in the 21st century. Go figure.