Okay, activists, time to feel old…
3 minute read
January 20, 2015, 1:22 PM
I just want to bring it to your attention for a moment that this all happened ten years ago today:
For those who don’t recall, these are photos from the J20: Counter-Inaugural photo set, which was about political demonstratons being held on the occasion of the second inaugural of now-former president George W. Bush, on January 20, 2005. That was quite a long day for me, coming up to DC from Stuarts Draft and attending multiple demonstrations in one day. I admit that it was a fun day.
Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the way the 2004 election ended up going down. On one hand, George W. Bush was an awful president. However, his main opponent, then-senator John Kerry, was an awful candidate. I admit that I voted for him, but primarily because he was not George W. Bush. In other words, if Bozo the Clown had been the Democratic nominee in 2004, I probably would have voted for him, too. He wouldn’t have been the first clown to run for president, though, and he certainly wouldn’t have been the last. However, I think that if John Kerry had won, we would have likely been just as bad of a president as Bush was, but much of the left would have given him a free pass because he would have been playing on the blue team. I have much respect for groups that, even when a person seen as more sympathetic to their cause is in office, they still keep on the officials. After all, if you have the “right” person in office, you ride them even harder than the “wrong” person, because then you may actually have a fighting chance of getting somewhere. But in hindsight, it’s just as well that Kerry didn’t win in 2004. Yes, Bush was awful, but he would be gone in four years no matter what due to term limits. Bringing John Kerry in would have reset that clock, and we would have potentially had eight years of a similarly bad president, just on the other team.
The other problem in 2004 was that the left’s mantra was “anybody but Bush”. And so they voted for anyone… except Bush. Perhaps if the Democrats had run a more charismatic Obama-like figure in 2004 who actually opposed the Iraq War, they might have been able to get everyone around one candidate and unseated Bush. But I’ve noticed that both major political parties tend not to run their big players when they’re going up against an incumbent. We get the second-tier guys, like Bob Dole, John Kerry, or Mitt Romney. And I suppose it makes enough sense. You run your best people when the seat is open, not when you’re trying to unseat someone, because the bar for getting them in is lower because it’s not as much of a referendum on the sitting president. The only sitting president in my lifetime to have lost a reelection bid was George Bush in 1992, and that was a case where his own party sort of left him out to dry.
In any case, it’s still funny to think that this was a decade ago as of today. Where has the time gone…
Categories: National politics