There is No Bush Third Term

By Alan Caruba

Between now and November 4 you are going to hear over and over again the phrase “the Bush third term.”

Let’s understand something. George W. Bush is not running for a third term. He is prohibited by the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice…”

The phrase, “the Bush third term”, bespeaks how utterly insane the very existence of George W. Bush has driven Democrats and their fellow travelers. In their hearts, they want to campaign against George W. Bush who twice defeated their pusillanimous candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, two of the greatest blowhards to have ever trod the campaign trail.

In both cases, unable to cope with the final vote tally, the Democrats cried out that the election had been “stolen” from them as if to say that the voters had been too stupid to grasp the merits of their choices or too lazy to have come out in sufficient numbers. How could it be that a Republican and theoretical conservative have been elected?

How can they campaign against a President who never vetoed a spending bill that Congress sent him for his first six years in office? How can they campaign against a President who embraced Teddy Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind Act that federalized the nation’s education system? How can they campaign against a President who signed the Medicare Prescription Act that added millions more to a virtually bankrupt social welfare system? Bush has been an incorrigible Democrat when it came to domestic politics and policies.

Where Bush differed, however, was his pursuit of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the projection of American power in Iraq. How awful Bush was to remove a pathological despot, Saddam Hussein, from power! How awful Bush is to have deployed troops and encouraged allies to degrade al Qaeda to the point that no one has heard from Osama bin Laden in months and those around him keep ending up dead.

It took from 1994 to 2006 for Democrats to wrest back control of Congress from Republicans and that was largely due to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. However, in 2008, voters can rightly conclude that America has won that war, thus eliminating it as a wedge issue.

Somewhere in the back of the minds of voters, too, is the realization that under George W. Bush the United States has not experienced another attack since September 11, 2001.

Further exasperating Democrats is the fact that the Republican choice for the presidency, John McCain, so often supports parts of their agenda that they have to pretend he isn’t the real GOP candidate!

Sen. McCain, that bi-partisan and non-threatening endless campaigner, just plods along, while their shooting star can’t help but scare the bejeepers out of voters as they begin to conclude that he is completely clueless and inexperienced.

So the Democrat campaign is now less and less about Sen. Barack Obama and more and more about the non-candidate, George W. Bush, a constitutional has-been as of January 20, 2009.

This is so insulting to voters that, by the time they have heard “the Bush third term” for the umpteenth time, they are likely to think it’s really not such a bad idea after all.