The Romney plan to rehabilitate the political image of George W Bush

[Politico]

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.

[Politico]

This attempted revitalization of "Blame Bush" reminds me of the following quote from the movie Traffic, which is probably not historically accurate but that is beside the point:

"You know, when they forced Khruschev out, he sat down and wrote two letters to his successor. He said - 'When you get yourself into a situation you can't get out of, open the first letter, and you'll be safe. When you get yourself into another situation you can't get out of, open the second letter.' Well, soon enough, this guy found himself into a tight place, so he opened the first letter, which said - 'Blame everything on me.' So he blames the old man, it worked like a charm. He got himself into a second situation he couldn't get out of, he opened the second letter. It said - 'Sit down, and write two letters.' "

[Politico]

I just learned that Bush and Romney were in the same graduating class in Harvard's MBA program. I wonder if there's any personal connection there?

I suspect Romney rarely encountered Bush on campus if only because Bush was usually *cough* drunk/hungover off-campus *cough*

[Politico]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House. With that said, continuing to blame Bush after almost four years of Obama is weak. The Obama Jobless "Recovery" belongs to Obama. Obama got the stimulus he wanted, and of course Obamacare. Obama got everything he wanted, and now he wants to point fingers? Blaming somebody else for your problems is the easiest thing in the world to do, but people expect more from the president. Years have passed since Bush. "Blaming Bush" worked great in 2008. "Blaming Bush" did not help Democrats in 2010, so why do they think 2012 will be any different? Don't get me wrong - I hope Democrats continue to blame Bush. I think it's only slightly less of a loser than that populist garbage the Democrats seemed poised to run on. It's still a loser, though, so obviously I support this tact.

Obviously Team Romney has no plan to rehabilitate the political image of George W. Bush, contrary to what the OP may be inferring. Governor Romney is his own man with his own ideas, has never spent time in Washington, DC, and he is a stark contrast to George W. Bush in pretty much every way. Governor Romney may not become Reagan 2.0 (I certainly hope he does), but he will easily be the best president of the 21st century thus far.

[Politico]

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.

I'm not going to say anything about Hoover because that's just a meaningless rant. Dubya was a good President in a position where we needed a great President. The 'he will be viewed as bad for 50 years' is clearly not true; a PPP poll from this January showed Bush had an approval rating of 45/46; in that poll, he was doing better than Obama, who was at 46/49. That's not perfect, but that's not so bad you spend 50 years railing against him. When a has-been has approvals like that, that's 'meh'.

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?

Insulting 45% of the country is a great way to win any election. You'll motivate them to turn out against you. You continue your meaningless ranting by invoking the Mafia, who have as much to do with the issue at hand as Herbert Hoover does.

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.

George Bush was not a 'failed President'; his approval ratings may have declined in his final several years, and apparently once he killed your cat, but he was OK; as I said above, a good President where we needed a great one. But good luck telling Americans the 'good times' not merely won't, but shouldn't, come back. A great way to win an election. Your belief that the 2010 elections showed that Republicans are Bush-come-again is at least defensible, but your belief that this will result in a loss betrays a remarkable lack of mathematics skills, in that you seem to not understand that 44,593,666 (the number of votes Republicans got in 2010 House of Representatives elections) is more than 42,191,291 (the number of votes cast for anybody who wasn't a Republican, not just Democrats and other left-wing parties, in 2010).

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 last sentence about inheritance and Rockefeller is more rambling; it has less to do with the topic at hand than the Mafia or Hoover. Your point that the 2000s cannot be restored is a truthism; you can't travel back in time. The 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc. will also not be restored.

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.

Fascistic movements generally draw upon a base of middle- and lower-class supporters, though rich people can support it too. Fascism is (this should all really be past tense) not really a class ideology. Your first two sentences directly contradict one another. I don't even vaguely understand what point your trying to make with the rest of the paragraph except that I feel a little frightened now, both of you and of the characters you're describing.

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.

We're now beyond the point where this has anything to do with George W. Bush or reality.

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.

In reply to your first sentence, doctors do deserve to get paid every so often. In reply to the second and third, it's always been that way. After all, if scams are revealed, accountants lose clients who have gone to jail, and if corner-cutting is revealed, engineers may lose their jobs; in America, this sort of thing is regulated pretty strictly (it was under Bush too), but it's this way everywhere. I don't understand what point you're trying to convey with the fourth sentence, so I have nothing to say.

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 don't understand the first sentence. With regard to the remainder, it was true in the 2008 election, though this again has nothing to do at all with George Bush.

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.  

'Culling of the middle class' does not normally happen under hard-right regimes -- this isn't a defense of them, but simply a statement of fact ('culling of political and ethnic opponents' happens). The second sentence is true. None of this has anything to do with George W. Bush.

In reply to this article's premise: as I mentioned above, as of January Bush's approval was 45/46 for/against. Democrats can no longer use Bush as a bogeyman because he is no longer as widely detested as he was a few short years ago, and politico's belief that the majority of Americans view Bush negatively is not held up by the data. If trends keep going this way, the idea of turning Bush into a new Reagan (somebody brought this up earlier) might be achievable by the end of the decade. But trends don't always continue, and I doubt becoming a hero will ultimately be Bush's fate; I do think time will judge him to have been a basically good President.

LOL! Priceless, particularly the section in bold because it captures the feeling I have whenever I read one of pbrower2a's diatribes. You are much more ambitious on here than I! Responding to a pbrower2a diatribe takes enormous effort. Well done, sir!

[Politico]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO the current president is not really something to run on.

Fixed.

Who knows more about jobs and the economy: A successful businessperson, or a "community organizer" best known for having a politician's tongue?

[Politico]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO the current president is not really something to run on.

Fixed.

Who knows more about jobs and the economy: A successful businessperson, or a "community organizer" best known for having a politician's tongue?

Herbert Hoover was a successful businessman too. We all know being a successful businessman automatically guarantees being a successful President.

We all know what four more years of Obama will look like. America does not want it. All apologies to France.

[Politico]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

Had George Herbert Walker Bush ran on his real agenda--"Read My Lips, Taxes will go up!"-- he never would have been nominated by the Republican party, and, if they had, even tankboy could have beat him in the general. GHWB obtained the Presidency through fraud. To validate that act of fraud in any way is pathetic.

GHWB was an effective VP, and other than raising taxes he did not really make any mistakes as POTUS. He was the last veteran to occupy the oval office if that counts for anything. Smart guy, too. Furthermore, taxes went up less than they would have under Dukakis, and less than they did under Clinton.