“IT's the economy, stupid!” is the phrase that Bill Clinton's top advisor James Carville taped about the presidential candidate's headquarters in the run-up to the election in 1992. The real message that Clinton should say “on message;” the state of the economy and his approach to rectifying it would be his ticket to the White House. Eight years later, when Clinton's vice president Al Gore was battling George W. Bush for the presidency, Clinton and Gore had a huge falling out because rather than following Clinton's lead and singing the praise of the then booming US economy, he allowed himself to be sucked into George W. Bush's faux-morality campaign. Gore gave a green light to the Bush campaign to muddy the waters with moral issues that were cynically used to whip up anti-Gore sentiment in the aftermath of the Clinton-Lewinsky fiasco. Rather than recognizing that, while most Americans found that whole affair pretty tawdry, the booming economy would still have trumped Bush and Company's self-righteous conservatism. The current situation in the US campaign, however, shows a significant twist on the tale of eight years ago. Rather than the candidates mimicking one another's stance when a particular stance seems to resonate with the public, the sitting president appears to be attempting to implement a number of policies espoused by the Democrat, Barack Obama. After both President Bush and presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain originally ridiculed Obama's statements that he would meet with any world leader, friend or foe, without preconditions, we now see the White House engaging in dialogue with both North Korea and Iran. In the case of the latter, in particular, no matter the rhetoric out of Washington, there do not appear to have been any preconditions for such meetings. Additionally, Obama's original calls for a timetable for withdrawing US soldiers from Iraq also met initial ridicule and criticism. Bush has always seemed to have missed the point, McCain less so. But it has been a long time since the US has seen the out-of-power party set the agenda for a presidential election. Actually, the last time it happened was 2000. And Bush won. We'll see if history repeats itself. __
