You are absolutely right. This election is something which really is "Bush's fault." He and his father destroyed the conservative movement with their non-confrontational approach to the Demonrats. The face of the Republican party in recent years has been not Ronald Reagan but Gerald Ford: superficially conservative, ineffectual, not very bright, lacking principles, mentally wimpy country-club Republicanism. Many of Bush's top people, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, are relics of the Ford administration. Condy is actually a disciple of Kissinger, IIRC. I began to get a bad feeling about W when he turned the last nat'l convention into a showpiece for RINOs like Schwarzenegger and Guiliani. Bush is completely out of touch with the average voter. His obsession with open borders and free trade with enemies like China betrays the big-business, country-club Republican orientation we should have expected from his MBA education.