Posted by
Tom Kummer on Thursday, November 06, 2008 5:23:33 PM
My reason for asking this is because of an email I received. In it was an exchange between an Obama supporter and a McCain supporter. The Obama supporter made the point that Obama will govern from the center because he will learn from the mistakes made by Bush. When I read that, my initial (sarcastic) response was “So you are saying Bush governed from the hard left and Obama won’t do that?” No, the Obama supporter was making the assertion that Bush pandered to the extreme right of the party too much during his presidency, and that Obama will learn that he can’t pander to the extreme right of his party.
But did President Bush really govern from the hard right. Let’s look at some domestic policies:
1) Medicare prescription drug program. Sure, obviously a right-wing position, increased spending on Medicare. Does that mean cutting Medicare is governing from the center?
2) Guest worker program for immigrants. Yeah, the extreme, far right-wing always supports that.
3) Amnesty for illegals. I never realized the hard right supported this, too. I supposed “throw them all out” would be governing from the center.
4) No child left behind. This gave us increased federal intervention in grade school education. This put him in opposition to Republicans who wanted to abolish the Department of Education. Which one is the far right-wing position?
The fact of the matter is that President Bush governed from the center for most of his domestic agenda, yet so many on the left think of him as the next Hitler.
Is there a lesson to be learned here? Perhaps the best one is that once you let your opponent define who you are, and don’t respond to it, you run the risk of having that definition of you stick. President Bush wasn’t one to be a poll watcher, and many times did what he thought was right regardless of what people thought of him. That is to be admired, but some attention needed to be paid to his image, because his enemies were left to define who he was, without refutation.