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Edited on Fri Oct-10-08 09:09 AM by HamdenRice
I wonder whether the country will sense a feeling of relief that will have an impact on the current economic crisis after election day?
I have this image of George W. Bush, just wishing for the fucking thing to end, so he can slink off to Midland, or Dallas, or Paraguay or wherever. Perhaps he is just stunned, perhaps he is in an alcohol and drug induced haze. I have this image of Bush living a kind of “last days of Elvis” existence – or more appropriately given his buffonish stature, more like Eddie Murphy’s famous “Last Days of Buckwheat” skit.
These pathetic, horrific last death throes of the Bush administration also remind me of a conversation I had with a prominent Republican just months after Bill Clinton was sworn into the presidency.
It was the Spring of 1993, and I was invited to a wedding on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by some acquaintances, a very ambitious couple – he was South African and she was American – who had also invited as many older, “important” people as they could round up. As someone who was not “important” and did not know this couple or their circle very well, I was seated at one of those tables where nobody knows anyone else. It turned out that the guest I was seated next to was one of their “important” acquaintances, a Republican political pollster – not today’s kind of Republican, but the old style New York/New England Republican, in other words, a reasonable, reality based person. We actually had a long, very interesting conversation. Unfortunately, I don’t remember his name.
Basically, he was very glad that Clinton had been elected. He said that his polling showed that during the last years, months and days of the Bush the First administration, the country experienced a severe sense of dread – unmoored, nonspecific dread, connected to their feelings about Bush. He told me that the most striking results of his recent polling was the overwhelming sense of relief from this dread that the election of Bill Clinton had caused, and this decreased dread was spread across all voting and demographic groups – Democrats and Republicans, young and old, rich and poor, black, white, brown and yellow.
For those of you who were too young to remember the early 90s, there was a sense that Bush the First was not just pursuing bad policies, but that he had gone insane, and was possibly evil. He had started two wars, in Panama and Iraq, the former allegedly just to muzzle Manuel Noriega who was threatening to spill the beans about Bush the First’s complicity in Iran/contra/drug trafficking; had helped steal an election (October Surprise); he had pursued destabilizing policies that seemed to drive up the price of oil and of gas at the pump on purpose to benefit his oil industry buddies; he had possibly unleashed new levels of drug trafficking; and he had possibly committed treason. Then, even worse, were the things that were flat out bizarre, like a news story about a political pimp taking boy prostitutes on a midnight tour of the White House; Bush the First vomiting all over the Prime Minister of Japan, broadcast on the TV news; Bush being absolutely stupefied by the existence of a supermarket scanner; and stories about the First taking mind altering drugs to keep some sort of stress induced, raging mental illness at bay.
Whenever the mainstream media tries to “critically” compare Bush the First to Bush the Lesser – suggesting that the First was far wiser than the Lesser – they are assuming we have short memories. In fact, the apple did not fall far from the tree.
I wonder whether the country will feel a similar sense of the lifting of dread come November when Obama is elected, or come January when he is sworn into office. I realize that we are living through a financial catastrophe that cannot be solved easily or soon, but it seems that so much of it has to do with a hopelessness that blankets the country and even the world and its financial markets, as a result of the continued occupation of the White House by The Worst President In American History. After all, given the evidence of what this administration can and can’t do, will and won’t do – 9/11, Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now this – there is a pervasive sense in the liberal blogosphere, and it seems in the financial markets, that nothing that comes out of Washington can possibly succeed, because, after all, most of the time, Bush and his cronies don’t seem to want to “succeed” in the traditional political sense. It doesn’t matter that (at least in my opinion) most of what’s being done to prevent the financial catastrophe is being engineered out of reach of Bush, Cheney and their rapacious cronies. As I said at the outset, during “The Last Days of Bush-wheat,” I see Bush as largely crouching somewhere in the White House, hitting the Jack Daniels hard, while popping Prozacs, poring over Paraguay travel brochures, hoping it will just be over and letting the grownups – the Democrats in Congress, the Fed and Treasury – handle things.
I wonder whether after an Obama election there will be a sense that at least the leadership in Washington doesn’t seem to be deliberately taking us over the cliff to benefit a small group of cronies, and whether that glimmer of hope will, as in 1993, at least put us on a path out of the crisis.
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