From what I remember, Bush and the GOP were just tremendously unpopular. It wasn’t just the wars, though that was a big part of it. People were sick of their shit because it became so obvious that they didn’t care one bit about the country and just ran it into the ground.
I think so too, because the out party traditionally does well in second term midterms, and the demographics favor the Democrats in 2016. But 2014 will be more interesting an election than this year’s because it’s not as predictable. The Republicans have a serious image problem nationally but local factors almost always predominate in the off years. There’s no good way to predict which one becomes the deciding factor.
My grandmother, in her nineties and life-long Republican became virulently anti-Republican after 2004 election thanks to the Terry Schiavo fiasco. She was horrified and furious at them for dragging “that poor woman” all over the television. The hurricane response cemented her opinion that the Repubs were dangerously incompetent. (We have cousins in Houma who took in the shorts thanks to Rita). She wasn’t impressed with Sarah Palin, either, let me tell you.
So add the Schiavo case as one more little bit of political theater that contributed to the growing anti-Republican impression.
From my unscientific memory…
I had always liked McCain before that election. He seems like a stand-up guy and straight shooter. I’m not a republican, but I always thought he was someone I could vote for.
But that wasn’t the McCain that ran for president in 08. He ran to the extreme right and courted the crazy in his party. He then seemed petty and mean-spirited, not at all Presidential. And then he picked an idiot as a running mate.
Does anyone else remember it that way?
If I kicked in your door, broke all your windows, set fire to your furniture and then defecated on the floor, how much would your distress be mitigated by the fact that I washed the dirty dishes that were in the sink?
I didn’t realize you were in Bush’s fraternity!
That’s how I remember it. If it had been McCain vs Gore in 2000 I probably would have voted for McCain. By 2008, there was no way I would, and that was before Palin.
That’s basically how I remember it. There was John McCain, who would have made a good president, and then there was John-McCain-hollowed-out-with-the-republican-party-establishment-shoved-up-his-ass, who is the guy who actually ran.
And the whole Sarah Failin’ thing was a cheezy attempt to try to woo people who supported Hillary in the democratic primaries under the assumption that it was just “identity politics”. “Oh you wanted a dame on the ticket? Why didn’t you say so? We got dames! Hey Karl, bring out one of he dames from the back!”
If only he had consulted Mitt Romney’s binders.
If only.
Bingo, spot on, exactly as I recall it also.
I still wouldn’t have voted for him over a Democrat, but the 2000 edition was definitely a lot more palatable.
Yes. You’ve precisely described my experience.
McCain has always been bad. He was a member of the Keating Five. But he can often be very funny, has the Hanoi Hilton backstory, and has McCain-Feingold on his resume. I think he fooled a lot of people. Under proper scrutiny in '08, his true self was revealed, IMO.
ISTM that before W, for a lot of people Carter was synonymous with ‘bad president’ (fair or not). W seems to have wrested that title away for himself, with a lot of help from the GOP overall. The reps seemed like a viable alternative after Reagan and after Bush I. They have seemed like con men ever since W.
I remember the 2nd W term especially as being a grind. W always seemed to be acting like some kind of dummy, and the bad news just piled up more and more. I still feel awful for all the innocent lives destroyed by the Iraq war. Never again please.
And, what Typo said.
I think you’re ignoring how bland Bush II was during his first year in office. I thought he was a moron during the 2000 election season and (grudgingly) voted for Al Gore (I didn’t follow the campaign all that closely, but I never had a sense of what Gore believed in). When Bush won I was disappointed, but I got over it pretty quick. Aside from the really hardcore Democrats, I think that’s how a lot of people treated Bush II before 9/11. He was just a guy keeping the seat warm until a Democrat (in 2004) or a better Republican (in 2008) took it from him.
W/o reading the other replies, anybody who wasn’t extremely nervous about the state of the economy in summer of '08 wasn’t paying a bit of attention. Ebert’s contention that we were in, or even thought we were in, a summer “awash in prosperity” in 2008 is completely wrong.
IIRC, the Republican field that year was pretty weak, and they actually elected the one mainstream Republican who could have won the election in a normal year, but the year was anything but normal.
George W. Bush was just an incompetent leader and should never have been President of the United States. There was very little the man touched that ended up better than it started, and his team had ideas other than “the best interest of the Country” in their heads. For each of us who couldn’t stand the man by 2008, there’s probably one thing that drove each of us to that position, but what that one thing was… that varies from person to person, resulting in a totality of failure that is depressing to behold.
I also disagree with the notion that Bush was good for the stock market - his administration marked the beginning of a secular bull market, of which we’re still not out.
It’s easy to forget all the crap that was happening during the Bush years. It seemed like there was a new scandal every other day. And I mean legitimate scandals, not stuff that was cooked up by the opposition.
The housing bubble burst in 2007, actually 2006 in some regions, and the stock markets were in slow decline after autumn 2007. The markets unraveled more quickly after Lehman Brothers went down in September 2008, but the economy was struggling before that.
Other factors were the perception the Bush administration’s response to Katrina, the WMD myths about Iraq, the Pat Tillman friendly fire cover up in Afghanistan, the Plame scandal, etc.
ETA: Remember, the Dems took back both houses of Congress in '06.
I’ve offered this theory before, but there were two things in 2005 that led to Bush’s demise in the public eye–Cindy Sheehan and Katrina.
Sheehan, you’ll recall, was a mother whose son had been killed in Iraq who became the public face of the anti-war movement. Up until she came along the anti-war movement was written off as a bunch of fringe nutjobs and America-haters, no matter how big it got. There were absolutely no progressive voices in the media; news chat shows had fire-breathing conservatives up against mealy-mouthed moderate mainstream journalists. (That’s why Michael Moore’s movies were so popular–that sort of full-throated anti-war viewpoint was not being presented anywhere else.) Sheehan was hard to write off like that, and suddenly it was OK to question the war–and, by extension, Bush.
(Sheehan herself has proven to be a bit nutty in the years since then. Still, you can’t deny the role she played in bringing anti-war sentiment into the mainstream.)
Since it was OK to question Bush, the media aggressively called him out over the bungled response to Katrina. The result was a one-two punch that changed the overall view of Bush irrevocably.