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No Time To HateWhy I didn't hear much about George Bush in New Hampshire.

By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, April 5, 2007, at 6:02 PM ET
George Bush. Click image to expand.

George Bush is particularly unpopular in New Hampshire. In one poll, his approval rating is 17 percent. The flu may have more fans. Among Democrats, he is particularly reviled—only 1 percent approved of him in the same state poll, which in the sample of 152 amounts to a single person. So, traveling through New Hampshire this week to watch Barack Obama and John Edwards, I thought I might hear a few meaty lines of Bush bashing. Every candidate needs to warm up the crowd, and a few jabs at the president—if not actual effigies—would seem like the way to go.

But the president wasn't mentioned much. Neither candidate talked about Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft-carrier landing or any of his other greatest hits. They didn't make fun of his intelligence, his mangled language, or that he refers to himself as "the decider," the references that often came up when I interviewed people in the audience afterward. There wasn't even a cheap shot at Dick Cheney, who is scorned these days even at the safe venues selected by his office.

The candidates talked about the war in Iraq, of course, but mostly in terms of their plans to remove troops or the debate over funding it. They didn't review the Bush administration's mistakes. You're much more likely to hear this familiar litany at a John McCain town hall meeting, where the candidate most closely associated with the President's Iraq policy needs to distance himself from it. McCain sometimes just blurts a haiku of famous moments of outrageous administration overconfidence: "Mission Accomplished, dead enders, last throes."

When Edwards talked in Concord about America's reputation in the world, he focused not on how Bush had damaged it, but on how to improve it—providing education to Third World countries, relief for AIDS sufferers, and poverty initiatives. In Portsmouth, Obama held a health-care marathon, discussing the issues with voters for nearly two hours. Bush wasn't mentioned once.

There are a few reasons Democratic campaigns don't need to bother much about the man they hope to replace. The first is that they're competing to show they have an appealing vision for the future, so they don't want to dwell on the past. Democratic activists may hate Bush, but even those who obsess about his swagger or his evangelical religious views are usually animated underneath by policy disagreements. They want their candidates to speak about the policies they favor.

Secondly, a little bit of snark goes a long way. In 2000, Republican audiences knew George Bush was talking about Bill Clinton when he promised to "restore honesty and dignity to the oval office." Similarly, Democratic audiences understand precisely what John Edwards means when he says, "I think we need somebody who is honest and open and a good and decent human being. Somebody who can restore some trust between Americans and their president." They're using the power of judicious understatement.

Of course, Republican candidates don't talk much about George Bush, either. Rudy Giuliani told his New Hampshire audiences this week that he's all for the war on terror but didn't mention, let alone praise, the president leading it (perhaps a smart move in a state where Bush lost the primary in 2000). When Giuliani needed a president who stood tough against his enemies and showed resolve in the face of criticism, he didn't use the example close at hand, but instead drove around the block to cite Ronald Reagan. When he needed to make the same point again in the same speech, he bypassed Bush another time and talked about Abraham Lincoln. He got away without having to answer the awkward question: Do you think George Bush has done a good job?

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of President George W. Bush by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The democratic presidential candidates aren't talking about Bush much because they aren't running against him. Even though Bush's unpopularity is at Nixonian levels and his number of successes as president is about equal to his number of successes in business, he is, thankfully, not the next GOP nominee.

Any candidate that campaigned primarily on the message of "Bush has screwed things up" won't go very far. The American people know he's screwed things up. What they want to know is which candidate has the best chance of getting us out of this mess. Kerry tried to run on the "Bush is a screw up" platform and we saw how that went.

It's ironic, given that for years, the democrats were derided in the media for having no new ideas or plans and for offering up only criticism of Bush, now people like Dickerson are questioning why they are talking about ideas and plans instead of just criticizing Bush.

And does the GOP have to offer now? Criticism of Nancy Pelosi for leading a bipartisan congressional commission to a foreign country. Something members of Congress have done hundreds of times before. Meanwhile, John McCain ties up a hundred troops, a dozen armored humvees, 3 Apache helicopters, and 2 gunships in order to do a photo op about how safe it is in Baghdad.

--Greatbear451

(To reply, click here.)

Bush is on his long slow slide into irrelevance. America is going to forget about him after 2008, hoping to hell he was just an aberration. Amnesia is after all the American way.

Unfortunately Bush may not be an aberration. He may just be a pure reflection of a lazy and declining country driven by pundit logic and spite politics. It wasn't just Bush who failed to think through the implications of invading Iraq, it was America that failed. And it isn't just Bush who can't figure how to win or get out of Iraq, it's America that can't figure it out.

If I don't sound too optimistic about life after Bush, it's because I'm not.

--nerdnam

(To reply, click here.)

Most Democratic candidates for President won't find it necessary to bring up Bush and his excellent Iraq adventure because they don't have to: it's already the focus of everyone's attention. The trick for Democratic candidates is to avoid getting too close to said elephant lest some of it's funk rubs off on them or they step in a pile of pachyderm crap.

Which is exactly Hillary's dilemma. She's inadvertently hitched her wagon to the Iraq elephant in an attempt to appear hawkish or strong on defense, but now realizes that that elephant is a losing proposition, politically. From all the twisting and obfuscating she's been doing, it looks like she's having a hard time acclimating herself to the elephant's aroma.

Republican candidates, on the other hand, have to perform an intricate ballet using smoke and mirrors to convince everyone that the elephant's not theirs, and that the elephant really isn't as big a problem as it seems. While they may be able to convince their base that the SCLM (so called liberal media) or some other boogeyman is entirely responsible for creating the cluster flop that is Iraq, they don't realize that that fantasy won't gain them any traction with the majority of the voting public.

One thing for sure, it's going to be an interesting election.

--Cerulean_Mutt

(To reply, click here.)

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