Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The rush to disown George W. Bush


Remember me?
One of the more amazing bits of nonsense that comes out of the mouths of Republican presidential candidates is their claim that President Obama is responsible for the poor state of the economy. We've all heard them say it time and again. It's as if they really think we all forgot the kind of shape the country was in when Obama took over from George W. Bush.

You remember George W. Bush? Or maybe you don't. If you've been watching the GOP debates you can be forgiven if the name of the man who ran the country before Obama is becoming a distant memory.

Yes, for those who count such things, George W. Bush's name has been uttered a mere 56 times by all candidates in the 16 major debates that have happened thus far.

President Obama's name has been mentioned a whopping 560 times.

But, what's even more interesting, as The Washington Post reports:

That's not to say that the candidates didn't have a Republican president at the tip of their tongues. Ronald Reagan, dead these last seven years and whose White House tenure ended nearly a quarter-century ago, by contrast, is a favorite topic -- surprise, surprise -- of the GOP debaters.

They invoked his name 221 times.

Even George H.W. Bush got only two mentions in the debates meaning that Republicans have to go back over 24 years to find a GOP president they are willing to talk about publicly.

I recognize that there is no upside for Republicans to hitch their wagon to the pathetic legacy of "W," but do they really think the rest of us will just forget simply because they are all hoping we will choose to pay no attention to the man responsible for the current fiasco?

As H.W. would say, "not gonna happen."

The electorate may have a short attention span, but I'm assuming that Obama and his campaign team will have no difficulty reminding voters how we got where we are, who was driving the bus at the time and how hard it's been to get back on the road to recovery because of previous GOP incompetence.

You can count on it.


(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

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