- REALLY AND TRULY NO EXIT. If you're looking for reasons to believe that the Bush political machine is losing its deft touch then look no further than Bloomberg News' report that the President will be extending his Social Security privatization world tour beyond the initial 60-day timeframe. This is an absolutely baffling thing to do. By all objective standards, the tour has been a catastrophic failure. He's induced zero new legislators to back his agenda. Privatization's numbers have sunk further in the polls. Indeed, the best polling evidence available suggests that the more people focus on the issue, the less they like the president's ideas. Even worse, we're now seeing clear signs that pushing privatization is driving down the GOP's overall level of support with key constituency groups like senior citizens and rural people, both groups that backed Bush in '04 on cultural grounds and are now being driven back into the Democrats' arms.
Frankly, Bush has won enough battles over the years that I have trouble believing his team would do anything as dumb as a tour extension clearly seems to be. Maybe they've got some trick up their sleeve so brilliant that I can't grasp it. Certainly if there's a trick here I'm not seeing what it's supposed to be. Then again, I refused to believe the polling that showed the Republicans misstepped on Terri Schiavo until I saw it confirmed three or four times because I was just incredulous that the GOP could err after having been so successful for so long at manipulating these cultural issues. Maybe Karl Rove's deft touch really has suddenly gone bad.
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