Posted on 11/30/2003 6:24:13 AM PST by Valin
Scenes of George W. Bush serving Thanksgiving dinner to US troops in Baghdad last week brought a lump to the throats of many Americans. But for a large number, it seems, the stuff in their throats was bile.
As the US heads into the 2004 election campaign, hate is back on the agenda and at a level not seen since, well, Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton.
"I never thought I would see this happen," says independent political analyst Charlie Cook, "but within the Democratic party, and many, many, many Democrats in this country, there is the same hatred for Bush that you saw among conservatives and Republicans towards Clinton."
Bush himself doesn't necessarily accept it. When asked by a British reporter in London recently why protesters hated him, the President replied: "I don't know that they do."
Yet political analysts say Bush is generating real animosity, and not just outside the US. The evidence of division shows up starkly in public opinion. In a recent Time magazine poll, 48 per cent of Americans said they were unlikely to vote for Bush next November, while 47 per cent said they were likely to.
The depths of these mixed sentiments are also on display in the streets, on badges like "He lied, they died", a reference to the war in Iraq, and bumper stickers with derisive messages such as "Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot".
Cook argues that this sort of antipathy is not typical of US politics. Nobody hated Bush's father, or really hated Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. You have to go back to Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson - "Hey, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" - to find that level of vitriol.
Bill Schneider, a political analyst with CNN and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, says it's the 60s culture war all over again. He agrees the antipathy among Democrats to Bush is deep-seated, but prefers to call it anger rather than hate.
"There is real anger against Bush, but it's different to Clinton," Schneider tells Worldwide.
"I would ask conservatives why they hated Clinton, they would talk about his behaviour and his values, not his policies. He was a draft dodger, an abortion promoter, a gun hater, a gay backer. It was his values."
Ask liberals why they're angry with Bush and it's his policies, Schneider says. "Iraq, the Patriot Act (which has increased government powers post-September 11), the environment, Iraq, oil drilling in Alaska, Iraq."
But it is more than that. Democrats thought Bush stole the 2000 election thanks to dodgy counting in Florida and they still don't trust him (75 per cent of Democrats don't, according to the Time poll).
Brookings Institution political analyst Tom Mann says Bush's critics see him as a phony who hides his true nature behind a disarming facade. Bush is "a wolf in sheep's clothing" to many Democrats. "In the minds of his critics Bush has successfully pushed a radical and harmful economic and national security agenda without any shred of electoral mandate," Mann says.
"Among Democratic activists, his election is widely seen as illegitimate and his leadership style as extremely partisan and arrogant. His soothing rhetoric belies a political toughness and ideological extremism."
All of which is making for a particularly bitter election campaign in the making. Bush claims he hasn't started campaigning yet - despite having raised almost $US100 million, much of it from personal appearances at fundraisers around the country.
But there's no doubt the Democrats are in full swing, and the frontrunner for the party's nomination is Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who more than anyone has tapped into the "hate Bush" sentiment.
"It's the soil he's growing in," Schneider says.
It is also fertile ground for an industry of deeply partisan authors, radio talk show hosts, newspaper columnists and internet websites on both sides of politics.
For example, Ann Coulter, a prominent conservative author and commentator, argues in her best-selling book Treason that Democrats are a bunch of traitors. She doesn't like liberal sections of the media, either.
In 2002, she reportedly told the New York Observer, in a reference to the Oklahoma City bomber: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to The New York Times building."
Liberals have their own quiver full of poison darts. The title of another bestseller, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken, says it all.
Then there is Jonathan Chait, a writer with US magazine the New Republic, who began a recent piece: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."
Chait revealed his antipathy was based not just on Bush's policies but on the way he walked, "shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo", and talked, "blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang".
Such intensity is producing bucket-loads of cash for both sides, with Bush and Dean both aiming to raise $US200 million. Billionaire George Soros has kicked in $US15million to anti-Bush causes, likening the US President's "supremacist" polices to the Nazis. But if Bush hate is exciting the liberal Left, is it enough to beat him?
Next year's presidential election will be partly a referendum on Bush's performance. On that front, the big issues the voters will be thinking about will be the economy, the war on terrorism and Iraq. The economy is turning around, although it is questionable whether the recovery now under way will wipe out the 2.5 million job losses since 2000.
On the other two main issues, Bush will be arguing Iraq is part of the war on terrorism; Democrats will be arguing it's been a disastrous diversion from the real job of fighting al-Qa'ida.
But a big question remains. Who will be the alternative president? Voters will demand not just a carping critic but someone with an alternative and attractive vision on the key issues of the economy and national security.
On this front some analysts think the Democrats will make a big mistake if they vent their antipathy to Bush by choosing the most anti-Bush candidate, Dean.
Democrats chose Senator George McGovern on the back of anti-Vietnam War sentiment in 1972, and lost to Nixon in a landslide. So what's the lesson for the Democrats with Dean? "Be careful," says Schneider. "It didn't work with McGovern."
Another New Republic writer, Ramesh Ponnuru, argues that Bush hate is a sentiment that unites the Democrats but "could lead all of them to ruin next year" if they let their hearts rule their heads.
As evidence, he cites the flood of money and other resources into Florida last November in a bid to oust the President's brother, Jeb, from the Governor's mansion, thereby avenging Al Gore's defeat and - arguably - making it easier for the party to beat Bush next year.
Instead, Jeb Bush won easily, and the money would have been better spent on close races elsewhere, Ponnuru argues.
Clinton's former political adviser Dick Morris argues that Dean is too liberal to win and "God's gift to George W. Bush".
But he has a different take on what is going on in US politics. First, he says, Washington has become more partisan, as the two big parties have become more able to control their members by providing the money needed for election campaigns.
Voters have responded not by becoming more polarised, he argues, but by being turned off. "They are hating both sides," he says.
Charlie Cook disagrees, saying the electorate is increasingly polarised and that it will ensure a big turnout of voters next year.
Whoever is right, one thing seems clear: in 2004 hate will help decide who runs America.
"Bring it on!"
Some guy from Texas
I don't think it is the same kind of hatred at all.
The conservatives seethed about Clinton because he continually lied and then laughed at everyone for believing him. And his fellow Democrats ignored it; some even admired it.
The liberals, on the other hand, are foaming at the mouth about Bush because he won the 2000 election, legitimately according to the repeated vote recounts, even those done by the Democrats and liberals. The Democrats continue to lie about that.
They hate Bush because they were unable to win or steal the election. It is their abject failure that rankles them, and they blame Bush rather than looking in the mirror to find the true culprit.
That is a significant distinction.
The Republicans will simply concentrate on debunking the Democrats' deceptions by advertising Bush's actual speeches over and over again. As usual, of course, the Democrats' deceptions will be vicious, and as usual journalism will participate in those deceptions with carefully edited half-truths. But the economy is on track to swamp the opposition party in '04 by itself, and on Iraq there are fair prospects that eleven more months of (painful and partial) progress will reveal the tunnel's end in plain sight.
I did not start 1992, or even 1993, as a Clinton Hater- the role grew on me as "the Golden Age of Clinton"
( Wes Pruden )
expanded across a long-suffering America.
At first, I thought Clinton would be yet another failed Southern Governor, in the Jimmy Carter tradition, who lucked out into winning the Presidency.
But lie by lie, and spin cycle by spin cycle, my dislike grew and grew. I can't even place a finger on the transition point of merely being passively resigned to enduring a fraud in office to actively wanting him out of there, but sometime between 1993 and the Contract with America, and the 1994 elections, it jelled.
Did you catch that snide remark inferring that the DIMS are superior to the conservatives?
Absolutely. And their desperation is making them rabid.
We conservatives have tangible, rational reasons to despise and hate Bill Clinton, whereas liberals hatred of G.W. Bush is completely irrational. Which, considering their "feelings over facts" approach to life, is to be expected.
While traveling on I-95 last week, a lexus passed me with a brand new bumper sticker that read "Re-Defeat Bush in '04". I thought that about sums up their entire argument. Facts be damned.
I couldn't catch up to explain that his side lost, get over it! And, will lose in round 2 also! It was Palm Beach County, Floriduh, where else? <|:-)~
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN. ...
Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore. ...
Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.
I guess the fires of Waco were the first rude jolt that awakened in me just how dangerous the Clintons were to America and American civilians... but it really was a tapestry- or maybe Krazy-Kwilt-- of one thing after another.
The Hell of it was, a lot of damning information, stories, and witnesses were out there, pre-1992, but the Establishment Media simply would not talk about them. If the internet and talk radio had been as big back then as they are now, we might have been spared.
And Monica is the least of what he lied about. There were so many, many things.
However, the real problem with the Monica episode is not that he had sex (or whatever he wants to call it) with her, but that he lied about it under oath in a judicial proceeding.
It wasn't "just about sex" as the liberals and Democrats and their propaganda media repeatedly insisted; it was about "perjury" and that is absolutely inexcusible.
Oh, it's quite a bit greater.
The hatred of George Bush has escalated during his tenure because the Left's most sacrosanct tenets have been exposed one by one by very public failures of their policies. The libs were a bit bumbed out before W came into office by the fact that no one could deny the success of welfare reform. This really rocked their foundation, and was significant emotionally. Then 9-11 exposed the lunacy of their touchy-feely foreign policy of appeasement and apology, and the danger inherent in their now demonstrably proven military tactic of cut and run.The war has simply revealed them to be 0 for forever in prognostications, and willing to go against their own values for partisan gain.
Now we are witnessing the public repudiation of the Left's chief economic tenet, that being the claim that tax cuts would HARM THE ECONOMY.
The liberals then, incapable as they are to admit they are wrong, project their own out-in-the-open failures on George Bush, and the act requires palpable, visceral hatred, ever increasing as the hatred now blinds them to the incendiary role it is playing in their self-immolation.
OK, I hated Clinton, but he never exposed us as being wrong in our beliefs, just the opposite.
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