Cal Thomas Admits the Obvious

The votes are in. Conservatives also consider the Bush administration to be a failure. The dean of conservative columnists, Cal Thomas, makes this the premise of his Townhall column for today. For fans of Greek tragedy, George Bush is the Creon of the modern political world. Like Creon, the only thing that Bush can really do is talk tough. Otherwise, he's blundered from one headstrong blunder to another. Bush is also like Creon in the fact that his failure doesn't rise to the level of epic tragedy. Because he doesn't have the transcendent virtues of an Oedipus, Bush's hubris is petty and embarrassing. Ultimately, Bush is a ham and egger. Even Richard Nixon was more interesting.

But then Thomas raises an interesting question about how to think of Bush failure.

If you believe the Bush presidency is a failure, what then? Do you delight in
whacking him like a piñata for the next 18 months with your only objective a
Democratic blowout victory in the 2008 election? If that is your strategy, do you ask yourself what kind of country a Democratic president will inherit and whether he (or she) will have the ability to quickly turn things around after months of pummeling a weakened president?

Thomas goes on to pose the problem in relation to the possibility of terrorist attacks, but the issue runs much deeper than that. People on the left have been thinking about the problem for a couple of years and I know lots of people who believe that the Bush administration has been hiding deep fiscal problems and that an incoming Democratic administration is going to face a fiscal crisis soon after taking office. There's also the problem of bringing competence back to the federal bureaucracy. Any thinking person knows that the FEMA's incompetence in relation to the Katrina disaster was just the tip of the iceberg. The Bush administration's hyper-partisanship drove out competent people everywhere and a Democratic administration is going to have to give a lot of attention to restocking the federal bureaucracy with smart and experienced people.


In other words, people on the left know there's going to be an enormous mess to clean up beginning on Jan. 21, 2009. I think that's one of the reasons why support for Hillary Clinton is strong within the Democratic Party. Hillary has baggage, she's not particularly liberal, and she's not nearly as charismatic as Barack Obama, yet there's a sense that she is somebody who can get the job done during tough times.

And most people I know on the left know that the failures of the Bush administration mean tough times after he's gone.

717 days to go.