I like the fact that four dozen people have been working on this for months. People have been talking about Obama “hitting the ground running” and it actually looks like he really is! Imagine that, we’re actually going to have a grown up heading the country.
That’s what I’ve been wanting to hear. The gag rule was the first thing I remember Bush doing when he got into office, and I thought to myself then, “uh oh.”
Might you be thinking of Bush’s repeated 2000 pledge to “restore honor and dignity to the White House”?
Meaning, AFAICT, that there would be no blowjobs going on there on his watch. His campaign was definitely stressing the “bring back the grown-up moral values and stop the sleaze” concept, but I don’t recall any widespread popular belief that he was going to govern with more intelligence or maturity than Clinton had.
In fact, the popular meme about Bush early on was that he was kind of a mental lightweight (which was why the Aug. 2001 Onion article “Bush Finds Error In Fermilab Calculations” was so hilarious—my personal favorite). Then he briefly acquired some gravitas after 9/11, but pissed it away pretty rapidly. As a new President, though, the “grown-up” credentials that he was touting seemed to be moral, not intellectual.
I’d like to see him dump DADT as well, but I think he’d probably be skittish about doing it right away since it was one of the first issues that Clinton tried to take on and got a lot of flak for it (flak which led to the inept DADT policy in the first place).
This response makes no sense to me. Was there some sort of document issued by SCOTUS saying that George Bush was going to fix the country’s problems? And the voting public is notoriously ill-informed.
No, all the SCOTUS really weighed in on was whether or not the manual recount process violated the Equal Protection Clause–they found that it did, and that essentially ended the Florida election and left Bush its winner (and by extension the winner of the Presidency.)
I can only assume that BMax misspoke or was misinformed.
Gitmo and Iraq were probably the top two reasons I voted for Obama. Now no matter who the president is, I can tell you we won’t be out of Iraq any time soon. But if Obama doesn’t end this American Inquisition toot-sweet, I’m going to be one disgruntled voter.
I hope he will be able to do something about the last minute rape of the environment that the Bush administration is trying to pull off before January.