Bush's attempts to ride to election victory doomed to failure

[emad]

Snip from The Guardian

Cowboy dreams


Bush's attempts to ride to election victory on the back of Ronald Reagan are doomed to failure, writes Philip James

Friday June 11, 2004

In death as in life, Ronald Reagan's sense of timing and theatre did not fail him. His final goodbye could not have come at a better moment for his party and the embattled man who would remain president.
George Bush has not hesitated to bathe himself in the afterglow of his hero's last act. If you log on to the Bush/Cheney re-election site, georgewbush.com, the home page has replaced all reference to Bush or Cheney with a single image: Ronald Reagan.

The semiotics are blunt: Bush equals Reagan. But as much as George Bush would like you to think that he is the heir to the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and as much as there are points of similarity, the comparison does not stand up to closer inspection.

Reagan's presidency coalesced around two big ideas. Cut taxes massively and defeat a global evil. On the surface, George Bush's presidency pivots around the same ideas. He's hoping that if his surrogates say it enough, people will absorb it as the truth. But just as Lloyd Bensen once told a presumptuous Dan Quayle, "I knew Jack Kennedy ... and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy," the American people knew the great communicator and they know George Bush is no Ronald Reagan.

When Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire", it was a dramatic, grand gesture. Finally a US president introduced moral clarity to the cold war, after decades of accommodation and stalemate.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1236675,00.html