Take a deep breath, and repeat after me: This election is about Obama, not Bush. This is 2012, not 2008, not 2004, not 2000. 2012.
Bush is a divisive character that nobody is interested in bringing back into the spotlight. If Barack Obama wants to try to go to that well one more time, it will be one time too many.
Except for partisan hacks who still believe that George W. Bush was a fine President, any attempt to revive Dubya as a model worthy of emulation will fail for at least the next fifty years. Democrats could long enunciate the name "Hoover" as a reason to vote for just about any Democrat. At the least Herbert Hoover had a moral compass that Dubya seemed to lack. Hoover was the wrong man for the time. Dubya was the wrong President for any time -- a shallow, vainglorious, dishonest man who would have created a disaster or at the least turned a small calamity into a big one.
Sure he is divisive, but he has his supporters -- those who want to enrich themselves at the expense of others and reward themselves for treating others badly and selling off natural resources, and those who want their superstitions and bigotry accepted as undeniable fact. Greed, cruelty, and folly have their built-in constituencies, but a good society shows how ineffective and destructive they are. So what if he has his supporters -- the Mafia has its groupies, too. Is that good reason for giving command of the economy to crime syndicates?
This election is about George W. Bush to the extent that politicians can reject the disastrous economic policies and international priorities of a failed President. Maybe the 2008 election was more that than the election of 2012 because the Republicans will have a different nominee. But the policies are the same, as the 2010 election showed. Republicans underplayed those policies and spoke only of 'budget deficits' and the 'failure' of President Obama to restore the good times. The 'good times' were a destructive binge, and the hangover is at best the recognition that one needs some other way to get a satisfying life.
Face it: the corrupt boom of the Double-Zero Decade cannot be restored; nobody believes in it anymore. Everybody wants easy money, but wise people recognize that most 'easy money' implies that one gets more than one's share of the reward from the industry and effort of someone else. (Sure, that may be an inheritance, one of the more benign ways of living off the achievements of someone else; a Rockefeller heir can't really hurt a deceased ancestor).
The big landowners, the tycoons and heirs, and the executives no longer need a successful and independent middle class. They never did; they had to tolerate it because of democracy. But that said, big landowners, tycoons and heirs, and executives have frequently shown a contempt for democracy because democracy keeps those people from grabbing everything of value. In other countries they have shown themselves the financial backers of fascistic movements. Such a middle class as they need consists of retainers in all but name -- schoolteachers who indoctrinate (or are fired), cops and soldiers who mow down strikers and protesters, clergy who offer 'pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die' to workers who toil to exhaustion for near-starvation rations but eternal damnation to anyone who shows any sign of dissent or resentment of severe inequity, professionals who are serve the needs of members of the economic elite as if maids or gardeners or else perform triage upon those who can still be exploited for profit.
Take a good look at two of the cornerstones of the old American middle class -- small farmers and small businesspeople. The consolidation of small farms into bigger ones has been seen as progress. Giant, vertically-integrated companies have squeezed out small-scale mom-and-pop manufacturers, food processors, restaurants, and banks. These giant entities have designed themselves to need only an expendable workforce that needs little training so that anyone who works for them can be disposed of at a moment's notice. Such a workforce is best described wit the Marxist word
proletariat.
Medical professionals have largely become employees for all practical purposes of insurance companies. Accountants know that they conceal scams of their clients or they lose their clients. Engineers at times are under pressure to cover up corner-cutting that can cause death and environmental calamities. Such professionals used to have some freedom of action that they no longer have.
Did you notice that the highly-educated part of the electorate voted heavily for Barack Obama in 2008? It used to be that a high level of education was one of the strongest indicators of being a likely Republican voter. Such is no more so. Middle-class blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and Jews voted heavily Democratic. Poor, undereducated whites voted heavily Republican. Maybe 'exotic' people distrust white elites that never trusted outsiders of any kind.
I can say this -- in the event of a culling of the middle class, as normally happens under Hard Right regimes, those parts that seem at all 'foreign' are the most vulnerable. Hard Right regimes need plenty of cheap labor, but they don't need people capable of or tending to think outside the Box.
