Get this. Bush is blaming the war for the total failure of his domestic agenda last year. Seems when there's a war on, no one can pull off grand plans domestically, and that's why Bush crashed and burned in 05.
But when Medicare was rolled out in 1965, the war in Vietnam was raging and we had over 200,000 troops there! The truth is that Bush's domestic agenda failed because it was deeply unpopular and the public no longer trusts him to do great (or small) things.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Bush Agenda Not As Far-Reaching
Goals More Limited in Time of War
...
After his far-reaching domestic agenda of 2005 collapsed along with his poll ratings, he and his advisers have concluded that grand proposals of the magnitude of restructuring Social Security or rewriting the tax code are unworkable in a time of war.
Instead, Bush has come around to the notion that a presidency can handle only one truly big thing at a time, and for the foreseeable future that thing is Iraq. As long as U.S. troops are fighting overseas, advisers now say, the domestic agenda will be limited to more incremental, less polarizing ideas -- singles and doubles instead of home runs, in the vernacular of the Bush White House.
In the vernacular of the Bush White House, I guess when your ass is born on third base and you think you hit a triple, it's quite a shock when all you do at the plate is whiff.
"He's a very practical, business-oriented CEO president who looks at the landscape, wants to continue to get important things done, and I think he articulated an agenda that can be prosecuted," said John Bridgeland, who directed the White House domestic policy council in Bush's first term. "There's a sense of learning. The country and the Congress didn't seem quite ready for Social Security reform."
Uh, no. The public rejected Bush's plan to phase out Social Security because he couldn't convince anyone there was a problem or that he could improve the system. The public didn't trust him then and they don't trust him now. Bush is just a caretaker president from now on, he can give all the speeches he wants and it won't change a thing.
