CounterPunch
Weekend Edition
June 4 -5, 2005
Brain Dead Democrats, Part 1,037
Why Bush is Getting Away with Murder
By LANCE SELFA
Check any opinion poll this month and you will find that President Bush's popularity rests somewhere in the mid-40 percent range. On specific subjects, like privatizing Social Security, Bush's ratings reach Nixonian levels of unpopularity, with about one in three Americans expressing support. And a growing majority believes the war in Iraq wasn't worth it.
Bush's and Congress's crashing support should be a signal that Americans are looking for an alternative to the right-wing politics that dominated the country. Yet, you'd be hard-pressed to find among the liberal organizations and the Democratic Party a sense of anything other than a feeling of siege and resignation. Why?
Usually liberals explain their impotence by blaming the American populace (or "the heartland") for being too right-wing to realize just how great liberal ideas are. Yet a "veteran Republican who has close ties to the White House," quoted by the May 24 New York Times comes closer to the truth.
"The only reason
still up there in the 40s is that the Democrats are really brain-dead and have nothing positive to put on the table," the operative said. "This is more than a rough patch; it's a dark moment right now for Bush." So if even Bush's supporters can see that a real opposition could cripple the administration, why can't the so-called "opposition" see it?
http://www.counterpunch.org/selfa06042005.html