Bush, First In A Long Time!

[Annie]

I just got this in an email from a friend. Granted a friend that is very pro-GW, she often sends me things that I Snope, and have to tell her, "Sorry, no go." (Why don't people do this on their own?). Anyways, I know enough to recognize whatever the source, this is true. Seems to me to be derived from this http://stager.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html:

Rare is the American president who arrives at his second inauguration
wearing coattails. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower won 57% of the popular
vote, but lost two seats in the House and one in the Senate. Richard
Nixon did better in 1972 and even picked up 12 seats in the House, but
he lost two in the Senate. (Nixon called it his "lonely victory.") Much
the same went for Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide and Bill Clinton's 1996
semi-landslide.

But when George W. Bush takes the oath today, he will be doing so both
with a popular majority of his own and with enlarged majorities in both
houses. That's the first reason why the forecasts now being made of a
hollow second term strike us as so much wishful thinking by the
President's critics. If second terms have historically tended to fail,
it's not always because past Administrations ran out of ideas, talent or
gas. It's because, frequently, they didn't have the votes. This time the
Administration does, at least if it plays the politics right.

The second reason lies within Mr. Bush himself. The President, who seems
to be a late bloomer politically as well as personally, came to office
in 2001 without any really large ideas of what he wanted to accomplish
other than a tax cut to draw down the then-surplus and to be the
un-Clinton. But he began to discover his purpose after September 11, and
the process of discovery hasn't stopped since. Now the man who
articulated the doctrine of pre-emption for foreign policy--confronting
"grave and gathering threats" before they explode in our faces, fighting
"wars of choice" before we have to fight wars of no choice--wants to
apply it to domestic policy.

That's certainly what Social Security reform is about. There will be no
Social Security meltdown during the remainder of Mr. Bush's watch, nor
for a decade after that. But as Treasury Secretary John Snow observed in
a meeting with Journal editors last week, predicting a crisis doesn't
take a Cassandra. It's a matter of arithmetic. We /know/ life expectancy
has risen to 78 years today from 62 years in 1935, when Social Security
came into being. We /know/ fertility rates have declined to two per
woman from the baby-boom peak of 3.7. We /know/ the worker/retiree ratio
has fallen to 3 to 1 from 16 to 1 in 1950. We /know/ the first baby
boomer will retire in 2010. We /know/ Social Security benefits will
exceed payroll tax revenue in 2018.

None of this is to say partial privatization is the only solution to the
crisis, although we see it as the best among politically realistic
alternatives. It is to say that there's no use crying that "crisis" is
such a harsh word, or that it isn't looming, or that it's best dealt
with by some other Congress 20 years hence. And it is this willingness
to take on challenges that are necessary as policy but optional as
politics that chiefly distinguishes Mr. Bush's Presidency.

Something similar can also be said of Mr. Bush's immigration proposal.
Again, the case can be made that there is no crisis--if the presence of
10 million undocumented workers, largely accounting for a $1 trillion
black market, isn't quite a crisis. But at some point, one
Administration or another is going to have to come to terms with the
integration of the North American labor market, and neither ignoring the
problem nor building a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall along our southern border
achieves that. Mr. Bush's guest-worker program may only be a first step
toward a more comprehensive solution. But at least the President is
facing up to reality.

There's another reality Mr. Bush is facing up to and it's called the
Hispanic vote. Paleocons and nativists may think the key GOP demographic
is uneducated whites. But it's hard to imagine a majority Republican
future without at least being competitive among Hispanics. In this
sense, the guest-worker proposal isn't just an exercise in economic
sanity but also in long-term party building on a par with FDR's capture
of the black vote.

One danger to such an ambitious domestic agenda is that it might cause
the Administration to lose sight of its foreign policy objectives. There
will certainly be pressure to engage in a more conciliating style of
diplomacy, particularly with Europe. There will also be a temptation to
find the quickest possible exit from Iraq.

But America's objective in the war on terror isn't a Nixonian "peace
with honor." It's a Churchillian "victory at all costs." That will mean
staying put in Iraq until the insurgency has been defeated, and coming
to grips with other emerging threats, a nuclear Iran above all. It would
help if the Administration could do a better job of selling its case
this time around; it would help too if Condi Rice could get the State
Department to join the effort. But ultimately foreign policy is not an
exercise in public relations, and unpopular choices may have to be made.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Bush described November's
election as "an accountability moment," in which Americans were offered
two competing visions and chose his. Now Mr. Bush must face another such
moment--his accountability to history. If he can stick to his guns and
principles, his second term will confound the skeptics as much as his
first one did.