I’m surprised no one else has explained this before.
It seems so obvious to me that I’m a little embarrassed to have to write it and explain it.
It worries me that no one else has, to date, stated so plainly and simply what I am about to tell you.
Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn in as president Jan. 20 because George W. Bush handed him the election on a silver spoon.
Maybe it’s up to me to tell this story because I’m one of the very few pundits in America who didn’t have a horse in the race in 2008.
First of all, let me begin by explaining that Bush is, without a doubt, one of the worst presidents of my lifetime – and I’ve seen some bad ones. The first president I remember – only vaguely – was Dwight D. Eisenhower. I lived through Lyndon Baines Johnson, truly a disaster and the height of corruption. I lived through Richard M. Nixon, need I say more? I lived through Gerald R. Ford, a man who didn’t understand Soviet domination of Eastern Europe – at the end of his presidency! I lived through Jimmy Carter – barely. I lived through George W. Bush’s father and his flip-flop on a “no new taxes” pledge. I lived through Bill Clinton – and have the scars to prove it.
Nevertheless, I have to admit, George W. Bush is right up there near the top of the worst of these men. Presidents need to be judged by their fruit. And Bush’s fruit is mostly rotten.
But it was not the totality of his bad policies that made the Obama election inevitable. Despite them all, there was still a reasonable chance John McCain could have won the election – not that I cared. I didn’t vote for him, and I’m happy I didn’t.
However, I still think it is fascinating and noteworthy that Bush took a decisive action late in the campaign that clearly tipped the scales in Obama’s favor. The only question is why he did so.
In the beginning of September, Bush announced, in the most dire terms imaginable, a bailout package for mortgage lenders. He assigned Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to begin emergency negotiations with Congress on the size and scope. It was presented to the American people not as a request, but as a demand. There was no time for debate. The very stability of the economy and the markets hung on an immediate action.
That’s the day McCain’s fate was sealed.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I don’t know why Bush chose that particular moment to tell us what we all knew – that the chickens were coming home to roost as a result of bad policies instituted in the 1990s and earlier. He didn’t even explain it that way. All he did was present an immediate crisis that had to be dealt with in draconian fashion.
What signal did that send to the average American voter?
The message was clear: The Republican Bush administration had blown it. A very bad mess had to be cleaned up. He even positioned the Democratic Congress to ride to the rescue.
Was this just incredibly bad politics – or was it something else?
What would have happened if the Bush administration had toughed it out for the next two months? What would have happened Nov. 4 if Bush didn’t lose his cool and invite the Congress, which was complicit in creating the mess, to take the lead in cleaning it up? Did he tip off John McCain to what was coming? Did he think at all about the ramifications of what he was doing two months before a presidential election? Or, conversely, if the situation was so dire, why did he wait so long to act?
Again, I don’t care about the outcome. To me, at the end of the day, there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between McCain and Obama. I actually believe, as I have said many times, freedom-loving Americans have a better chance of reawakening the country and turning it around with Obama and the Democrats inheriting this debacle than we would with McCain in the White House and the Democrats running Congress. It is Obama and the Democrats who will reap the whirlwind for at least the next two years. They are sure to push all the wrong buttons, make matters worse and pay the price at the polls in 2010 and 2012.
But it’s still curious. Why did Bush throw the election? There’s no other way to say it. That’s what he did. Was it stupidity? Was it disloyalty? Or was it something else?
