The Washington Post’s Richard Cullen wrote about George Bush‘s remarkable ‘Teflon’ qualities this week, and he‘s got a point.
For the past six months George Bush has slaughtered by the mainstream media, as elites in print and TV spent the first three months of the year hyperventilating over John Kerry and the unified Democratic Party, claiming repeatedly the Democrats hated Bush so much that they were turning out in record numbers at the Democratic primary. But that claim, like so many others, simply turned out to be false.
But luckily for the bash-Bush crowd, as soon as the primary season ended, the war in Iraq flared up again. And the same leftists who were predicting a bloody quagmire on the battlefield a year ago started gloating gleefully of images of dead Americans and burning buildings.
Add to that the 9/11 commission, Richard Clarke‘s dream sequence on “60 Minutes” and a book Bob Woodward co-authored with Colin Powell, and you have six months of almost exclusively bad news for George Bush.
In fact, the mainstream media is so programmed to run negative stories on George Bush that almost nobody‘s reporting on polls that are actually showing the president‘s numbers going up.
A new “Washington Post” poll and a “USA Today” survey showed that Americans are rallying behind their president. His approval ratings are up. He‘s trouncing John Kerry on national security issues, on terror issues and has even pulled even on the economy.
A six months of political hell, George Bush‘s continued popular support has to be seen as bad news for John Kerry. The Massachusetts Senator has got to stop talking about Iraq. He‘s got to start focusing on the economy and try to remember why he wants to be president of the United States, because somewhere between Iowa and Washington, the senator has lost his political bearings.
He better right himself quickly or else he‘s going to find himself on a one-way trip to Dukakisville; and believe me, that‘s a long, ugly ride.