Tag: GWB

Will Clinton take over as VP?

Will Clinton take over as VP?

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A recent article on FoxNews suggests that Barack Hussein Obama should drop Vice President Joseph Biden from the ticket in 2012 and put Hillary Clinton in the job instead.

I don’t think she will do it.

She will stay Secretary of State for the balance of the first term. If BHO is re-elected, she will resign shortly into the second term and no one will blame her as the SecState job is brutal.  This will allow her to publish one more book and do the money-raising chicken-dinner circuit.  She will then run in 2016 to succeed BHO, taking credit for thegood that she did as SecState but distancing herself from BHO’s screwups.

If BHO would lose in 2012 , she would be even better positioned for ’16.

Also, dropping Biden in 2012 (unless he is sick) will be seen as intensely disloyal by the American voters.  No President has changed VPs for an election since FDR put Truman on the ticket.  Nixon ran through a couple VPs but that was because Agnew was even more crooked than Tricky Dick and even then it wasn’t for an election – it was mid-term and Agnew had to resign the position.

It would be near political suicide to switch VPs in the 21st century just based on politics. Even George W. Bush didn’t do it with Dick Cheney which would have been a good move for the party. Cheney had terrible numbers and was never a candidate for President in 2008. Putting a fresh face on the ticket would have allowed Bush to weasel out of some of his mistakes and would have setup a successor candidate (rather than the very limp and inadequate McCain).  For that matter, GWB could have put McCain on the ticket and given him a better standing to run for President with fewer competitors in the primary.

If Biden should become very ill, Clinton is the obvious choice for VP. I have nothing against Mr. Biden, so I don’t want anything bad to happen to him, but if for some reason he is faced with a life-threatening illness, Hillary will be the logical and politically-prudent choice for VP.

Biden is here to stay if he is healthy. Look for Clinton on the ticket in 2016.

It is no longer someone else’s mess

It is no longer someone else’s mess

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Every President, except for George Washington, inherited something from the previous administration. Sometimes this is good and sometimes it is bad.

President Barack Hussein Obama has been talking for quite some time about the “mess” that he inherited from George Walker Bush. He has made references to mops and other allegories to describe the challenges that he has faced. While that is all well and good for the first few days of the Presidency, at a certain point BHO needs to own the problem.

That day is today.

There is no defined time for the honeymoon period of a new candidate. Most people felt that September 11, 2001 was close enough to the inauguration of George Walker Bush (just under 9 months) that the attacks on that dreaded day were at least partially the fault of William Jefferson Clinton. The honeymoon is certainly longer than the first 100 days that are all the talk at the beginning of a term. Everyone seems to agree that it doesn’t extend beyond a year from the date the person is elected.

For the past 12 months, BHO has been the President or the President-Elect. Every day he has received security briefings. Every day he has had access to and influence over thought leaders on a wide range of issues. Every day, he could pick up the phone and call any world leader, banking leader, Senator, Governor, or Representative.

When a person inherits a farm or house or china from a parent, from that day on the item or property belongs to the heir. This is the same now for the issues within the United States. The mess no longer belongs to GWB – it is the sole ownership now of BHO and he better get to work fixing it and stop talking about mops!

RANT! Mexico attacks!

RANT! Mexico attacks!

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A lot of noise was made about how George Walker Bush ruined our relations in the international community.  I have discounted this since international relations are always opportunistic and this is a perfect case in point. 

Mexico has been a close friend to the United States for decades.  The President of Mexico was always warmly greeted by GWB and I am sure that Barack Hussein Obama will greet him warmly as well.  But the confusing signals that BHO has sent on NAFTA combined with the foolish blocking of Mexican trucks (surely a concession to the politically powerful Teamsters) have triggered a needless and foolish international crisis and show the lack of multi-dimensional thinking that is required to run this country.

Now this foolish move is going to cost us billions in tariffs on goods that we ship to Mexico.  Hurting our economy by violating NAFTA in a down economy is not something we should be doing.  Offending our international friends is also something we shouldn’t be doing.

The good news is that international relationships are opportunistic, as i said above.  If we drop this stupid mistake and stop violating our treaties then Mexico will surely drop the trade war. Then we can all go back to being friends again – at least until our resume-lacking President screws up again.

DEMOCRATS IN POWER: STOP BEING THE LACKEYS OF THE UNIONS AND UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS GOOD FOR AMERICA!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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Should we take a decade long break regarding George Walker Bush?

Should we take a decade long break regarding George Walker Bush?

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I have written about the legacy of George Walker Bush several times on this site.  Most notably, I did a 5 part series that tried to answer the question if GWB is the worst President ever.  Now I read an opinion by Thomas Fleming, who is one of the most respected and well written presidential historians that we should all take a long sigh and relax for a bit before grading the man.

I respect the work of Mr. Fleming (and the WSJ) to quote too much of his article on this site.  Please go to their site and read the full opinion but here are some highlights that I thought were interesting.

Several polls of historians have named George W. Bush the worst
president in American history. This baffles me. I’ve been writing about
presidents for a long time. What I know, and what I presume these
gentleman know, doesn’t connect.

Is Mr. Bush worse than John Adams? When a shooting war at sea started
between the United States and revolutionary France in 1798, Honest John
wrote a letter to George Washington, offering to resign so that George
could resume the job. How’s that for presidential leadership?

The American economy came to a horrific standstill; smuggling became
New England’s chief industry. Someone described the embargo as “cutting
a man’s throat to cure a nosebleed.” Nonplussed, Jefferson quit,
telling only James Madison, his secretary of state, who was de facto
acting president for the last year of Tom’s term.

Next, Wilson talked Congress into declaring war on Germany on the
assumption that we would not have to send a single soldier to France.
Before the war ended, we had 2,000,000 troops overseas, and in three
months of fighting lost 144,000 men.

Warren G. Harding confessed to reporters that he was not up to the job.
He told one newsman that he wanted to make the U.S. tariff higher than
the Rocky Mountains to help Europe’s industries recover from World War
I. The appalled reporter realized the president had one of the biggest
issues of the era exactly backward.

Worse than Jimmy Carter, the self- proclaimed Washington “outsider” who
presided over the most horrendous stagflation in our history? As his
poll numbers sank, Mr. Carter had the temerity to lecture citizens on
their “crisis of spirit.” His approval rating had plummeted to 22% when
Ronald Reagan defeated him.

In this light, however wavering, maybe it’s time to suspend the rush to
judgment on George W. Bush for 10 or 20 years. I suspect we will decide
Mr. Bush’s first term, with his decisive response to 9/11, deserves
some praise, and that his second term succumbed to an awesome amount of
bad luck, from his generals’ disagreements on how to fight the war in
Iraq to the Wall Street collapse of 2008.

So does all this mean that I will stop trying to figure out his rank among his peers.  Probably not, but at least I know that my final opinions should wait 2020 or later.  Stop by then and see what I think.

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