"Giving Kerry a Free Ride:
The Left and the 2004 Election"
Stanley Aronowitz, Portside
There is an old saw of political forecasting: "it's the
economy, stupid". Bill Clinton popularized it in his
campaign to unseat George H.W Bush and it seemed to
work, despite Bush's swift and apparently painless
victory in the Gulf War (in retrospect it was not
nearly as smooth as was initially reported). According
to most assessments, the senior Bush was defeated by
his failure to address the 1991-93 recession with bold
interventions that appeared to recognize the issue, let
alone make a real difference.
A decade later the
incumbent national administration led by senior Bush's
son, George, is presiding over a stubbornly flagging
economy. More particularly, if many Americans are
experiencing declining living standards — whether they
have a full-time job or not —, according to
conventional wisdom the prospects for returning the
president to a second term are said to be grim. If the
perceive that the government is indifferent to their
plight, they surely will not support another four years
of pain and suffering.
Upon taking office the second
Bush administration was confronted with a largely
inherited incipient recession. True to the neo-
liberal, supply-side tradition its chief strategy was
to take trickle down measures to stimulate private
investment. At the same time, after September 11, 2001
military spending soared, largely on the basis of
borrowed money, even as the economy stagnated.
Despite enacting two huge tax cuts, mostly for the very
wealthy, and reducing the prime interest rate to almost
the vanishing point — 1% — George W. Bush's first term
has been marked by job losses due to falling industrial
production amid technological displacement, income
stagnation and overproduction.
