Tag Archives: George W. Bush

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Try to imagine this happening … soon!

Not too many years ago, President and Mrs. Obama welcomed back to the White House their immediate predecessors, President and Mrs. Bush, to unveil the official portraits done of George W. and Laura Bush.

The portraits are hanging on the walls of the White House, along those of all who lived there before them.

This video illustrates the remarkable charm and grace — not to mention the remarkable comedic timing — not only of Barack Obama, but of George and Laura Bush.

I’m now trying to imagine how the next portrait unveiling will go when the next president invites his immediate predecessor and his wife back for a similar ceremony.

At this moment, I don’t feel very good about how that will go with Donald Trump playing host.

Oh, how I want to be wrong about that.

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Pollsters need a careful revamping of their methods

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If it sounds a bit familiar that public opinion pollsters are going back to the drawing boards after missing the call of the 2016 presidential election …

It’s because you’ve heard it before.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/307111-pollsters-go-back-to-drawing-board

Virtually ever “reputable” poll had Hillary Rodham Clinton winning the presidency on Nov. 8. Some had her winning by a fairly comfortable margin. She, of course, didn’t. Donald J. Trump is now preparing to become the next president.

Why is this familiar?

I recall the 2004 election in which President Bush won a second term over Sen. John F. Kerry. The sticking point that year was in Ohio, where exit pollsters had Kerry carrying the Buckeye State. Then the votes started pouring in. Bush won Ohio. He was re-elected. Kerry and his team were stunned. They thought they had Ohio in the bag. Had they won, they would have had just enough electoral votes to defeat the president.

Those dismal exit poll results, along with other misfires around the nation, signaled the end of Voter News Service, the outfit that coordinated all the polling and vote tabulation around the country.

The screw-ups this time were much more severe. Even the once-highly regarded FiveThirtyEight.com poll done by Nate Silver missed by a mile. Silver’s analysis had Clinton with a 71 percent chance of winning on he eve of the election.

Of course, many of the pollsters are trying to cover their backsides. They say they predicted Clinton’s national popular vote percentage, more or less. They missed, though, in several key battleground states where Trump won: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida — all states won by Barack Obama in 2008, who won all of them again except for North Carolina in 2012.

Polling has come a long way since the infamous “Dewey beats Truman” headline of 1948. However, as we witnessed during this election season, it still has some distance yet to travel.

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Open your eyes to threats to Obama

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Michelle Malkin is one of the nation’s more fiery conservative columnists.

I don’t care for her world view, but I’ll read her essays every so often just to hyperventilate a little, oxygenate my bloodstream; it’s good for my physical health.

Today, the Amarillo Globe-News published a little ditty from Malkin that deserves a brief rejoinder. She writes about what she calls the “assassination fascination” since the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

Malkin talks about how all those meanies on the left keep saying they want to kill Trump. They’re echoing earlier meanies who said the same thing about President George W. Bush.

The only mention I could find in the column of President Obama came in a sentence in which Malkin asks why the president is silent on these idiotic pronouncement from aggrieved lefties.

http://michellemalkin.com/2016/11/22/from-kill-bush-to-assassinatetrump-the-return-of-assassination-fascination/

I’ll accept that as a good point. The president ought to condemn such talk.

However, let’s take stock of something else.

Nowhere in Malkin’s screed does she mention that Barack Obama received arguably a record number of threats against his life during his eight years in the White House. There were assassination threats being leveled constantly at the president. The Secret Service has been working diligently to examine all these threats against the current president.

Therefore, this “assassination fascination” isn’t a one-party monopoly.

I agree that such threat-making is dangerous and uncalled for. The lefties who say such things need to get a grip, take stock and understand the consequences of what they’re saying.

A columnist who launches into a partisan polemic, though, needs to understand as well that there’s plenty of guilt and blame that belongs to her side of this argument.

Why didn’t she condemn the Barack Obama haters for their equally shameful pronouncements? Oh, I know. It doesn’t fit her right-wing narrative.

national news, political news

Obama might speak out as a former POTUS? Bad idea

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Barack Obama is sending some signals that he might not leave the public arena once his successor takes office.

The 44th president of the United States might keep speaking out even as the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, begins his term.

Let’s think for a moment about that.

OK. I’ve thought about it. It’s a bad notion. I hope the president rethinks his temptation to keep speaking out.

I have applauded two former presidents — George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — for their decisions to stay away from the rough-and-tumble. Both men have declared their intention to stay out of the limelight. They both have said essentially the same thing: They had their time in the arena; it’s time to cede the spotlight to someone else.

I was particularly pleased that George W. Bush remained faithful to that pledge, particularly while former Vice President Dick Cheney kept popping off about President Obama’s foreign policy decisions. I urged Cheney to follow his former boss’s lead: Keep your trap shut, Mr. Vice President.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2009/03/follow-your-boss-lead-mr-vice-president/

Barack Obama’s time is coming to an end. He will have plenty of work to occupy his time while he returns to some semblance of a private life. He’s got a presidential library to plan and develop. He can set up a foundation that continues to speak to the issues near to his heart; the state of race relations comes to mind.

Should he provide post-presidential critiques of decisions that come from the man who’ll succeed him? I hope he keeps his thoughts to himself.

As many of his predecessors have noted, we have only one president at a time. The guy who’ll sit in the Oval Office will get plenty of hits from the rest of us out here in the peanut gallery.

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Trump ‘mandate’ getting smaller by the day

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Donald J. Trump’s so-called presidential election “mandate” is disappearing right before his eyes.

The president-elect has captured the Electoral College vote by a healthy — if not overwhelming — margin. He’ll finish with 306 electoral votes to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 232 votes. Of course, that assumes that all the electors earmarked for both candidates actually vote that way when they take the tally in December.

I’ll be intrigued, though, to hear whether Trump declares his election is a “mandate” to do all the things he wants to do: build the wall, ban Muslims, toss out trade agreements, “bomb the s*** out of ISIS,” you know … stuff like that.

Clinton’s popular vote margin has surpassed 1 million ballots, with the “lead” sure to grow as vote-counters tally up ballots in Clinton-friendly states such as California.

I don’t for a second doubt the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. He won where it counted. To be sure, Clinton will draw small comfort in knowing she collected more ballots nationally than the man who “defeated” her.

However, I think it’s worth stating that the winner needs to take some care — if he’s capable of demonstrating that trait — in crowing about whatever “mandate” he thinks he got from an election that clearly is sending mixed messages throughout the nation and around the world.

The mandate is shrinking each day.

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Indeed, I cannot help but think of a friend of mine, the late Buddy Seewald of Amarillo, who once talked describe the local effort in the Texas Panhandle to “re-defeat” President Bush in 2004. Bush, then the Texas governor, won the presidency in 2000 in a manner similar to the way Trump was elected: He got the requisite number of electoral votes — with a major boost from the U.S. Supreme Court — while losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore.

Might that be the rallying cry if Donald Trump runs for re-election in 2020? It works for me.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/clinton-popular-vote-trump-2016-election-231434

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Election result: no ‘authoritative command’

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My dictionary describes “mandate” thusly: an authoritative command or instruction.

That’s pretty clear, correct?

So, it’s fair to ask: Does a presidential election in which the winner captures more electoral votes than the other candidate, but who fails to win — by an apparently growing margin — the popular vote deliver a “mandate” for the victorious candidate?

I would say categorically, “no!”

Here is what we are facing with the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. He won, by a comfortable margin, the electoral votes he needed. His opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is continuing to pile up more actual votes than Trump.

The president-elect made some bold pledges while winning. He’s going to build a wall across our southern border, ban Muslims from entering the country, repeal Obamacare, revoke trade deals.

He said that “I alone” can fix what he believes is wrong with the country.

Does an election result that we’ve witnessed give him license to do what he promised to do?

I do not question the legitimacy of Trump’s election. He won this race fair and square. The system wasn’t “rigged” to ensure his election. Sure, some will argue that it was. Keep saying it. It’s not so.

However, I do not sense that voters delivered a “mandate” for him to make sweeping changes.

Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 with 43 percent of the vote. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 also with 43 percent of the vote and was re-elected four years later with 48 percent; George W. Bush was elected in 2000 with one more electoral vote than Al Gore, who won more popular votes than Bush. Neither of those men’s victories commanded “mandates” any more than Trump’s. Their victories were equally valid.

For that matter, John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960 with slightly less than 50 percent of the vote, and by a margin of fewer than 140,000 ballots. Is that a mandate … an “authoritative command”? Hardly.

Trump’s fans are continuing to crow about the mandate that their guy captured while defeating a candidate virtually every media pundit, politician and so-called “expert” knew would become the next president.

The Trumpkins need to tone down the boasts. They need to understand that effective and constructive governance is a shared responsibility, that the winners must work with those they defeat.

In this case, more than half of those who voted ended up on the losing end of this election, which adds volume to their voice.

Trump’s mandate? He needs to proceed with great care and caution.

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Now … about the Electoral College

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Election Night 2016 proved to be one for the books.

Donald J. Trump got elected president of the United States despite being outvoted by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But wait! He won more electoral votes.

They’re still counting ballots and it appears that Clinton’s vote lead will expand before they’re all done.

Then came the question from one of the folks attending an election watch party at some friends’ house: Is the Electoral College in the U.S. Constitution?

Yes it is. Article II lays out the rules for the Electoral College. You know how it goes: We aren’t voting directly for president; we’re voting for electors who then meet in December to cast their votes for president in accordance — supposedly — with the majority of voters from their respective states.

I’ve found myself defending the Electoral College to people abroad who cannot understand how it works, or why the founders created the system. In November 2000, for example, my wife and I were in Greece, the cradle of western civilization and the birthplace of democracy. The Greeks are quite sophisticated about these things. However, they couldn’t quite grasp the idea of one candidate — Al Gore — getting more votes than George W. Bush, but losing the election. The 2000 presidential election was still in doubt while my wife and I were touring Greece. I defended the Electoral College as best I could.

Sixteen years later, we’ve had another circumstance with the “winner” getting fewer votes than the “loser.”

It’s the fifth time in our nation’s history where this has occurred. Three of them occurred in the 19th century; two of them have occurred within just the first two decades of the 21st century.

I’m not yet ready to jump on climb aboard the dump-the-Electoral College bandwagon. I have to say, though, that that I am beginning to grow less enamored of the archaic system that was devised by men who — in their time — didn’t grant rights of full citizenship to women or to blacks. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920, for crying out loud and it took landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s to guarantee full citizenship rights to African-Americans.

The gap in time — just 16 years — between the last two elections in which one candidate wins the “popular vote” but loses a presidential election is giving me serious pause about the wisdom of a system that hasn’t changed with the nation.

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Transitions should be peaceful … always

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Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump are giving Americans a fascinating civics lesson.

A bitter, divisive, ruthless and occasionally slanderous presidential has come to an end. The president is about two months out from the end of his two terms in office. The president-elect — one of the principals in the aforementioned campaign — is about to take the reins of the only public office he’s ever sought.

The two men met for 90 minutes in the Oval Office on Thursday.

They sat before the media and spoke of the transition that has begun. No outward sign of the acrimony that punctuated this campaign. No apparent hard feelings over the amazingly nasty things these men said about each other.

As Trump noted, they had never met face to face — until Thursday.

Now, to be sure, the backdrop isn’t entirely peaceful. Demonstrators have been marching in major-city streets for the past few days protesting Trump’s election. They vow to keep it up. Nor will the outward peacefulness at the White House dissuade others from making angry statements about the winner of this campaign, or about the candidate who lost, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That shouldn’t cast too large or too dark a pall over the formalities that are occurring at and/or near the center of power.

The president is vowing a smooth transition; indeed, he wants to model the hand-off he got from President Bush and his team in 2009.

The peaceful transition of power is a marvelous aspect of our system of government. It becomes especially noteworthy when the presidents are of differing political parties.

In this particular instance, the transition should become a virtual miracle given the fiery rhetoric that was exchanged over the course of the past 18 months. Indeed, in the case of Trump, he’s been at the forefront of one of the biggest political lies of the past century: the one that suggested that President Obama wasn’t a legitimate American citizen.

None of us knows what the men said to each other in private. I would love to know how that conversation went.

However, we’re entitled to hear what they say in public. I am going to retain my faith that the tradition of peaceful political transition at the highest level of power in the United States will continue.

It’s all part of what enables the United States of America to remain the greatest nation on Earth.

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Chaotic campaign becomes even more chaotic

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You want chaos on the election trail? Pandemonium in the board room? Shock in our living rooms?

Welcome to Presidential Election 2016, which is heading for what looks like the wildest finish in history. Why, this might even top the 2000 election, where Al Gore won more popular votes than George W. Bush, but lost the presidency because Bush got one more Electoral College vote than he needed.

I’m not going to predict that this campaign will end with that scenario. The grenade that FBI Director James Comey tossed into the middle of this fight has the potential of upsetting everything we thought about the bizarre nature of this bizarre campaign.

He said he’s found more e-mails that might have something to do with Hillary Clinton’s on-going e-mail controversy. We don’t know what’s in them. We don’t even know if she sent them.

Donald Trump calls it the “mother lode.”

I keep hearing two things: (1) The polls are tightening and (2) few voters’ minds have been changed because of what Comey has said.

Are we really and truly going to elect someone — Trump — who has admitted to behaving boorishly? Are we going to elect an individual with a string of failed businesses, lawsuits, allegations of sexual assault leveled against him?

We’re going to do this because the FBI director has inserted himself and his agency into the middle of a presidential campaign while saying virtually nothing of substance about what he might — or might not — have on one of the candidates?

Am I happy with the choices we face? No. I wish the major parties had nominated different candidates for president. We’re stuck, though, with these. We’re left with a choice. Of the two major-party nominees, the choice is clear — to me.

If only we could rid ourselves of the chaos.

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Trump tears at the American democratic fabric

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Donald J. Trump’s refusal to agree to accept the results of the election in the event he loses — which now seems more probable than ever — raises historic concerns about where we might be headed once all the ballots are counted.

The Republican presidential nominee would not commit to accepting the outcome while responding to a question from debate moderator Chris Wallace. He’ll “look at it” when the moment comes, Trump said.

Trump is now on the cusp of losing the presidency to Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. We’ve had a long and well-established — and wisely admired — tradition in this country of losing presidential candidates accepting these results with grace and class.

Peaceful transition of presidential power begins right there.

Trump won’t promise to do that.

Oh, I can hear my friends on the right now griping about the “precedent” set in 2000 when Democratic nominee Al Gore refused to concede the election to Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The immediate aftermath of that vote count was swathed in tension and controversy. The results from Florida weren’t yet known. That state’s electoral votes would be decisive in determining the next president. Gore conceded, then took it back once it became evident that another authority needed to step in; that would be the U.S. Supreme Court.

Well, the court ruled 5-4 that the Florida ballot recount should stop and that Bush would finish with 537 more votes in that state than Gore. Bush won the state — and was elected president.

What did Gore do? He conceded again — for the final time — and in the process brought some humor into the event by agreeing that “this time” he wouldn’t take it back.

He offered his full support to the new president.

So, let’s get off this idiotic notion that Al Gore did what Trump might do on Election Night.

Donald Trump is hinting that he might not accept the results no matter how wide the margin. In the process, Trump is feeding a dangerous — and demonstrably false — narrative about “rigged” and “phony” election results.