More inconvenient truths

Why are so many Democrats feeling uneasy about the 2008 elections? Every indication is they’re going to win big. Republicans in Congress are sure doing their part to keep Democratic hopes high. Hardly a day passes without the GOP leadership blocking some new initiative people desperately want—such as pulling our troops out of the Iraq civil war or refusing to allow our government to negotiate lower drug prices. You might think they’re tanking this election and that they don’t want to win. And you could be right.

Why else would Rudy Giuliani, the liberal, pro-choice former mayor of a city they despise, be their leading candidate for President? Sure, they love his campaign slogan (“Vote Democrat and Die!”) but TV’s Fred Thompson is already rehearsing that line and with his years on Law & Order will be more convincing.

The GOP faithful doesn’t much like what has happened to their party under Bush. They recall how Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson devastated the conservative movement for a generation. So if 2008 is shaping up like that kind of debacle, why not let that slug Giuliani absorb the beating to show what happens when the party abandons its family values and tops its ticket with an adulterous, value-challenged weasel?

Of course, that’s only speculation. What is really bugging Democrats is the inconvenient truth that the next President will inherit a federal government resembling the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Comptroller David Walker says the “biggest threat facing the U.S. is not terrorism but fiscal irresponsibility”.

Deficit spending by President Bush and the Republican Congress increased the national debt by $3 trillion in six years, to an unprecedented $8.8 trillion or $29,000 for every American. What the Bushies have done to the federal government makes a piker of Grover Norquist and his tax dodgers—all Grover wanted to do was make government so small you could “drown it in a bathtub.” The Bushies expanded the government and made it so costly, globally hated and incompetent the country may never recover.

Iraq is the only war America ever waged without raising taxes to fund it. Instead, President Bush cut taxes for the rich and told everyone else to “go shopping”. In his new book, “Paying for America’s Wars”, Robert Hormats argues that failure to engage the American people in funding the war not only runs counter to tradition but big deficits and heavy dependence on foreign capital will place U.S. security in peril for decades to come. Hormats, by the way, is no liberal weenie. He’s vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and a former official of the National Security Council.

Getting out of Iraq will not solve all the economic problems the Bush Administration won’t be around to see. We’ve deferred payments, our military is threadbare, our trade balance is a disgrace, our infrastructure is crumbling, our social programs are withering and the most vulnerable people in our society are at the greatest risk they’ve been since before the New Deal.

The American public must be prepared for some very hard times. What’s ahead for the “winning” Democratic ticket isn’t just straw hats, spangled bunting and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Which is why mainstream Republicans are chortling as Democrats prepare to regain the White House.

If Goldwater’s defeat set conservatives back two decades, think about the Democrats in 2008 and their two talented front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Can you imagine a worse time for the first woman president or the first black president--succeeding a man who entered the oval office with surpluses as far as the eye could see and leaves it treading water?

To Rush Limbaugh, the Bush Legacy never looked so good.