Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Politics Is Definitely An Art

To be successful in politics, it seems to me you have to have a sense of timing. There are a lot of factors which you can't control but nevertheless they are factors which the voters expect you to control as an elected official. And if you can commit and action that coincides with a usual pattern and claim your action caused the change, you become the big man. Even tougher to pull off is finding a way to speed up the pattern. There are some circumstances where you can control a situation but it would require extreme action.

The U.S. economy is supposedly on the rebound soon after President Bush pushed major tax cuts that he said would create jobs. He does this in a time when it was likely the economy would have rebounded on its own. The country has never gone four straight years of a down market and we just completed three. To add fuel to it, the economy is recovering quickly mostly due to massive military spending to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanastan. Talk about a spin. The ugly face of war spurs our economy and Bush claims it was his idea of the tax cuts that did most of the work. Excellent work my genius political friend. No wonder you are President of the United States.