Thursday, Jan. 16, 2003 | 8:50 a.m.
The first priority of any new president is his re-election because not being re-elected is very humiliating. If Bush 1 had kept his promise about no new taxes and somehow kept Desert Storm on the front page until 11-3-92, he would have won re-election in a landslide. Bush 2 will not make the same mistakes.
Really rich Republicans love money so much that they send a ton of cash to the Republican Party every time a candidate says tax cuts. Upon taking office, the first thing that Bush 2 did was pass huge tax cuts, but he delayed most of them so that they couldn't hurt the economy before 11-2-04.
Sept. 11 was the luckiest break any new president ever got because it gave him the opportunity to stand on a pile of rubble with a fireman and a bullhorn and shout that he was going to find and kill the evildoers, and his popularity went sky high.
The war with Iraq is not about weapons of mass destruction, or oil, or democracy for the Iraqis; it is about re-election of the commander in chief.
JIM RILEY
archive
