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Not so Fast
Rich Galen Monday September 26, 2005
I remember the last time the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC proclaimed the end of a Presidency somewhat before the Constitution decreed it should be so.
It was just about this time of year in 1998 when everyone - and I mean everyone - was certain that Bill Clinton might remain in the White House, but his term was effectively over.
The Monica thing had been going on since January. The long August recess had begun with the President telling the nation he had been lying about it since the beginning. The Congress came back in September with House Republicans doing the Ren & Stimpy dance o' joy and the House Democrats measuring the damage their President was doing to them.
And it wasn't just the President. Vice President Gore was simultaneously running away from his boss while trying to explain how it was that he was sitting in his office making fund-raising calls. Remember the famous "No controlling legal authority" line? And then there was that whole fund-raising-with-the-Buddhist-Monks fiasco.
Among the chattering classes, the debate wasn't over whether or not Democrats would lose seats in the House, but how many seats they would lose in the second mid-term elections which were looming on the close horizon.
When I did panel discussions with Democrats, I maintained the GOP would probably pick up about a dozens seats; my Democratic counterpart maintained Republican gains would not exceed about eight.
In the end, the Democrats won five seats and Newt Gingrich lost his job for the price of it.
That's how quickly things can change in politics. And President George W. Bush has not two, but 14, months to get things turned around before the mid-term elections in 2006.
The big rally here this past weekend which was designed to generate anti-Bush as well as anti-war sentiment, attracted somewhere between "Tens of thousands of people" in the Washington Post's lead to "at least 150,000" later in the front page article.
As Washington protests go it was somewhat larger than average, but nothing like the protests which attend such high-anxiety events such as a World Bank meeting.
The NY Times didn't even have the protest story on its front page, settling for a two-column photo and a longish-caption.
President Bush and the national response effort for Rita are getting generally high marks as in this graf in the Christian Science Monitor:
The national response to hurricane Rita - from the federal government, as well as from states and local municipalities - appears to have been focused and orderly in a way that the response to hurricane Katrina was not.
It is not noted in the CSM piece, but I will, that the state and local municipalities in question were largely in Texas. The people of Texas, generally, and Houston, in particular, have chosen better leaders than their counterparts in Louisiana and New Orleans.
President Bush's choice for Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, will be confirmed by the full Senate next week. Mark Shields, somewhat to my left on the political spectrum said on PBS' Newshour of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV):
"Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization of Women said 'he got the message, didn't he?' which just confirms the worst and most negative perception of Democrats as little more than a confederation of interest groups that are responsive, and when the interest group yells 'jump,' the Democrats say 'how high.'"
On that same program, Conservative writer David Brooks reminded the panel that when Ruth Bader Ginsberg - at the time the general counsel of the ACLU - won confirmation by a 96-3 vote, Republican Senators said, in effect:
"We don't like her, but we are not going to kowtow to our interest groups who are calling for her head."
All I'm saying is that it is a bit too early for Democrats to be measuring for drapes in the Speaker's, the Senate Majority Leader's, or the Oval office.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the WashPost and PBS articles. A final (until I find another one I like) photo from last week's Afghanistan trip, and a Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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