Post Scripts: About the pending election

If you’ve wondered what President Bush’s reelection campaign was going to look and sound like, now you know if, that is, you saw his first election advertising on television.

Coupled with his State of the Union address, you get the picture: Bush keeping America safe and Bush offering more goodies.

He will be kept very busy from now ‘till November doing photo engagements, not actually harping on 9/ll, but doing his best to keep you thinking about how he came to our rescue. We’ll hear how he saved the nation from the Saddam Hussein and how he’s keeping a few other threatening nations from showing up on the Gallatin square.

The 2004 Republican convention has been scheduled to end not too many days prior to the third anniversary of the 9/11 attack. This is not unexpected since he has made national security the main thrust of his administration. You may not like the president but you have to give him credit, he covers his …bases. No matter what political idealism you like, or what your sense of responsibility is, he has a treat for you.

Like a tax cut? He is planning to make those tax cuts for the most wealthy citizens permanent. Think health costs are too high? He’s "fighting" for lower costs and a tax credit for you. He’s going to lay aside some money for the unemployed and job retraining – not a lot but some. If you’re worried about that near-a-trillion deficit, don’t be. He’s promising to cut it in half in five years. How will he do it? Fiscal sanity as if you didn’t know.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Like the moon or even Mars? He says he wants to go to both and I’ll second the motion because I see no reason not to send him there. Unfortunately it turns out he didn’t mean he’d go, but some of us believe that a guy who turned a $240 billion surplus into $550 billion deficit deserves the honor.

All this is not entirely unexpected. You can always tell when it’s an election year when the political, vote-getting proposals begin to float out of the White House. This time it’s different because it seems so illogical that a sitting president could pay so little attention to the fiscal problems the nation faces.

I was just a boy during The Great Depression and its aftermath. At the time President Roosevelt had a host of antagonists and for a time I was convinced they represented a majority of Americans. But it was not long until FDR captured the hearts and votes of the multitudes hurt by the Great Depression and they, in turn, crafted a political environment that put people back to work and stabilized millions of households.

Wealthy Americans, of course, did not like Roosevelt but remained well-off enough to be able to deride what they saw as socialistic answers to economic problems. Trouble was, they did not represent the views of ordinary Americans. Roosevelt won the presidency four times by a landside.

I’m no expert but it seems to me this president’s hold on the voting majority could be quite thin. I can imagine that John Kerry, the Democrat’s choice for president, may also lie awake nights with mixed emotions about the mess he might inherit. First, he may bask in the honor of being the Democrat’s nominee for the presidency, and, second, he may lie awake wondering why he wasn’t satisfied with being a United States senator.

By the time this election is over we’ll know why they call politics the most promising of all careers.