Izquierda Marxista

George W. Bush: Las ropas raídas del emperador

 

Autor: International Socialist Review, EE.UU.

Fecha: 14/3/2004

Traductor: Guillermo Crux, especial para PI

Fuente: Editorial, N° 34- marzo-abril 2004


International Socialist Review Issue 34, March–April 2004

George W. Bush
The emperor’s threadbare clothes

FOR THE first time since he stole the White House, George W. Bush actually seems to be sweating. His normally arrogant team of political henchmen seems off balance. Even the usually sycophantic press is stirring, with Time devoting a cover story to "Bush’s Credibility Gap," and NBC’s Meet the Press host Tim Russert coming about as close as he ever will to pitching a few hard questions to Bush in a one-on-one interview February 7. Even some from his own party are worried. "The White House’s biggest problem is that there’s been too much hubris," commented a Republican representative in the Time article.

What happened? A turning point came when Bush’s handpicked arms inspector David Kay reported in January that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "We were all wrong," he said, undercutting the entire official rationale for the war. The finger-pointing between the administration and the CIA, and Bush’s promise to investigate "intelligence failures"–after the election–didn’t help either. Added to that was the fact that Saddam’s capture hadn’t slowed the resistance to the U.S. occupation, forcing the Bush team to go to the UN to seek help in stabilizing Iraq. But this isn’t the only thing that has undermined Bush’s "credibility." Former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s new tell-all book presents hard evidence that Bush planned from his first days in office to invade Iraq and seize its oil assets. Vice President Dick Cheney’s relations with Halliburton, recently exposed for flagrant profiteering from Iraqi reconstruction contracts, has added to the bad news for Bush.

Kay confirmed what many in the antiwar movement said all along–that Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were simply a Bush ruse to trick the population into a war for oil and empire. The WMD lie may be the one that has hurt Bush the most. But others–like the disclosure that the Medicare "reform" bill passed last fall will cost $120 billion more than advertised, or that the federal budget deficit will exceed half a trillion dollars this year, or that some of Bush’s own economists aren’t optimistic about job growth–also contribute to Bush’s slide.

National opinion polls registered a five- to ten-point drop in Bush’s approval rating in the space of about ten days in January. This took place just as Democrats–appealing to a primary electorate that loathes Bush–were getting free publicity for their criticism of the president. National surveys showed Bush losing to Democratic front-runner, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry in November. Some polls even showed Bush losing to Senator John Edwards, Kerry’s main challenger for the Democratic nomination.

Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson’s biographer, ought to know something about presidents who lose their standing. "It is the general erosion of the president’s credibility," Dallek says of Bush. "It’s like water dripping on a stone. Whether it’s weapons of mass destruction, budget deficits or the cost of his Medicare program, you have a general decline in the man’s trustworthiness." In LBJ’s case, his Vietnam-inspired loss of support forced him out of the race for reelection in 1968.

In 1968, the majority of the public turned against the war in Vietnam after the Vietnamese liberation forces’ Tet offensive gave the lie to official propaganda that insisted the U.S. was winning the war. LBJ also confronted a revolt at home–militant antiwar and Black Power movements. Bush may not face the acute challenges that Johnson faced, but the ongoing disaster of the occupation in Iraq continues to take its toll.

Still, Bush’s troubles don’t guarantee that a Democrat will beat him. For one thing, the Bush administration has been such a godsend to big business that he will continue to have an edge in money and media, and he hasn’t started to spend his $200 million war chest, fattened with corporate contributions.

But more important is the weakness of "the opposition" that could take advantage of Bush’s crisis. For most of his term in office, Bush has benefited from a near absence of opposition. With the Democrats acting as if they couldn’t challenge the "wartime president," it was no wonder that Bush appeared invincible. Bush’s recent collapse has exposed the genuine vulnerability of someone who, after all, didn’t even win the most votes in the last election.

Many people who opposed Bush’s war on Iraq hope that putting a Democrat in the White House would produce a real change. They should take a closer look at the record of the Democratic Senator John Kerry. Kerry, for instance, voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He voted for Bush’s disastrous education reform bill passed in 2001. And he voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, which legalizes FBI and CIA spying on dissidents under the guise of "fighting terrorism."

With opposition like this, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration feels confident that it can weather the controversy over Iraq’s weapons–and eventually push ahead with its imperial plans to "remake" the Middle East. And though the multi-millionaire senator is currently Wall Street’s second choice, he’s not likely to stir much fear in those quarters if business decides that Bush can’t win.

Democratic primary voters have anointed Kerry because he has successfully argued that he is the most "electable" of the candidates. But if Kerry follows the logic of electability to its conclusion, he may just find out that given a choice between Bush and Bush-lite, the Democratic Party’s Black and working-class voting base may just stay home on election day.

This election year, real opposition won’t come from inside the Washington establishment, but in the streets–in the form of an antiwar movement that can build protests against the U.S. occupations in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, in protests for abortion rights, gay marriage, and in strikes to defend workers’ rights. After all, movements like these forced LBJ out of the White House.


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