http://www.pensitoreview.com/2007/09/28/molly-ivins-was-right/Molly Ivins Was Right: Bush Is the ‘Dead Chicken’ Wired Around the Neck of GOP Voters
Posted by Jon Ponder | Sep. 28, 2007, 8:25 am
A few days after the 2004 elections, the late Molly Ivins found a small sliver of a silver lining in the reelection of George W. Bush.
Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin’ chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could. He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog’s neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing’ll smell so bad the dog won’t be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won’t kill chickens again.
The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.
Nearly three years later, with the 2008 election ramping up, it appears Molly was right. Bush’s lousy performance, especially his mishandling of the war and the economy, has brought the Republican Party to its lowest point since Watergate, all but making it cinch that the GOP will fail to win back the Congress or hold the White House next year.
In a survey conducted in June, just 31 percent of respondents self-identified as Republicans — down from 37 percent in 2004 — and just over 36 percent identified as Democrats. Meanwhile, the number who declined to state an affiliation was at an all time high of 33 percent. Many analysts believe that many of these new independents are fiscal conservatives and political moderates who have been driven out of the GOP by Bush’s incompetence and malfeasance.
With neither party laying claim to half the electorate, the presidential campaigns in this cycle, like those of the recent past, must fill in the gap to reach 50.1 percent of the vote by appealing to independents. But this challenge will be especially daunting for the GOP nominee. First, with a base of 31 percent vs. the Dems’ 36 percent, he will have a slightly larger gap to fill. Secondly — and this is key — unlike the Dem candidate, the GOP candidate will have the dead chicken, or, to mix avian metaphors, the albatross, of the Worst President Ever inextricably wired around his neck.
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http://www.pensitoreview.com/2007/09/28/molly-ivins-was-right/