Good Thing There's An Election Coming

When you look back on the legacy of the Bush administration, you kind of have to wonder. Does Barack Obama have it right when he says the last thing we need is four more years of W?

Actually, I think Obama has it exactly right ... four more years of the of George Bush would be devastating for America ... but not for the reasons Barack is running on.

Let's start with the Bailout / Rescue / Screwing that the we got this week. There is no question that the policies (primarily Democratic, but with lots of blame to go around) of making credit highly available to people that should not have had access to it has created a serious problem for our financial markets and that something had to be done.

Now other than pointing out that we had a serious problem (as opposed to "crisis") and pulling the parties together ... was there any other leadership that was offered? Not that you could tell. Did it occur to him that we'd been through this before? Did it occur to him that the private market had resources to help deal with this as well (thank you Mr. Buffet, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo)? Did it occur to him that we didn't need to add billions of dollars of additional earmarks to this proposal?

But this was just the latest example of a situation were W provided weak leadership.

Barack Obama says that John McCain votes align with George Bush 90% of the time. I think in the last debate Sarah Palin indicated that Barack Obama voted with George Bush 96% of the time (that's what I heard, I'm not sure whether that's what she meant). The truth is W is a go along to get along guy on most domestic issues -- and you can see his direct impact in the huge amount of growth of domestic spending in the last 8 years (something that somehow Barack never points out)

It took him over 5 years (over one whole term) to break out the veto pen for the first time. George Bush votes with EVERYBODY. He has stepped it up a bit but still has only 28 total vetoes and 33% of those have been overridden by Congress. We haven't seen this type of leadership since Warren Harding.

America could definitely use some fresh leadership that would take us in a new direction.