First, the job of the two non-Presidential arms of the highest levels of the US Government is to act as a counter-weight to the President. Period. Bear in mind that the Founding Fathers were rebelling from a system where "to undermine the (King) was to undermine the country". (I am aware of Canada's ties to His/Her Majesty.)
There is a lot of romance about the office of the President. But in many, many, ways the man himself is but a figurehead in our government. Particularly when you get one as vacuous and impressionable as Bush the Lesser.
I'm not naive enough to think that Presidents haven't had, or shouldn't have, advisors, and that those advisors didn't/don't shape the President's opinion. But W seems singularly unable/unwilling to posit his own opinions as an overlay to those whose intellects he uses to insulate his lack of same. THAT is scary. For all his other faults, no one can say Clinton isn't at least a very smart man. Whenever W is pressed for background on his positions he either hides behind "it's for the good of the people" or his apparent zealotry for God. That is even more scary to me.
As for the Democrats....*sigh*...one has to wonder just how hard it is to find a useful platform. So Clinton screwed them (and everyone else, apparently *wakka wakka wakka!*) on the morality/truth angle. The Republicans did a masterful job filling that void with W. But, come Presidential election time, their problem of late has been that they have not figured out how to win over any red states.
Their "strategy" seems to have been "win the states with the highest concentrations of populace and hope to bleed off enough from the others". While I can understand that as a starting point, it should have been painfully clear by 2004 that was simply not enough.
And moreover, that gentry class Vietnam vets with aristocrat wives may fill $1000/plate dinners in Boston, New York, Chicago, and LA, but don't do dick for Joe Middle America with a second mortgage on the farm.
Winning control of the house and senate may have been an opportunity to play up some kind of anti-Republican referendum announcement by the American public, but instead they turned it into another flogging of the same dead-as$ themes and attacks on the Republicans that DIDN'T win them either of the last two Presidential elections!
Hillary? Obama? With the possible exception of Arkansas (and that's a big stretch), are either of those two going to pick off any red states? With what, exactly, as the platform? I just don't see it.
Meanwhile, I would vote for a Republican ticket of some combination of McCain, Powell and Bloomberg in a heartbeat
And, coming from someone who has voted Democratic in every Presidential election since I came of age, THAT should scare the Democrats.
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