The Best Thing That Happened in 2005

2005 opened up with President Bush at a seeming all-time political high. He won re-election by a far easier margin than seemed likely just a few weeks before Election Day. His party’s congressional majority was stronger. The political world, it seemed, was his oyster. For believers in truth, justice, peace and the real American Way, it seemed a dark, dark time indeed. What nefarious horrors would the denizens of darkness hurl upon the land?

It turns out that the dark denizens chose to slay the one beast the highest of the high Democratic archangels, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, set up to be indestructible. Social Security. That decision by the High Priest of the Deep Dark, Karl Rove, exercised through his puppet, George W. Bush, was the best thing that happened in 2005.

Bush’s crushing defeat heralded a year of constant downward slide, not into perdition (that comes later, according to Bush’s own beliefs) but into political weakness and irrelevancy. Almost nothing he proposed to do even more harm to the country was possible.

It was a weird thing to try to knock off. There was no great public cry to destroy Social Security. There’s legitimate concern over where it’s headed, but I heard that twenty years ago in college. There’s always going to be concern. But the reason it’s invulnerable was due to a very crafty key provision St. FDR put into the system.

Social Security isn’t welfare. It’s not “need-based.” It’s income-based. And there’s the genius. As long as the great middle class is paying in it’ll expect a pay out come retirement. And the great middle class constitutes the great American voter. It’s not a progressively fair program in terms of who gives and who gets, but it’s politically impossible to eliminate, maintaining the moral commitment to those who need it.

It’s like trying to get rid of Santa Claus. It ain’t gonna happen.

Not only did the defeat make Bush suddenly vulnerable right at the top of his second term but it eliminated any real hope of a personal bond with the majority of voters. Bush won the election. But there was little love for the man across the board. Without that personal commitment, Bush had little to keep moving on in his second term outside of wise policy initiatives, and he blew that right out of the gate.

This vulnerability is what I suspect helped prompt the New York Times to release its information on the government’s illegal spying inside the USA when the Patriot Act was under review. A strong Bush would have blasted back at their “unpatrioticness”; and the GOP and talk radio stormtroopers would have rallied against the “liberal press” and all. But it didn’t happen.

Weakened by the Social Security debacle, Bush reeled from issue to issue over the years. He lost control of the budget debate. The budget which came up in the fall ticked off almost every piece of the GOP in some way, either spending too much on everything or not enough on some things. Bush was down far enough for the NYT to exercise its moral duty to truth and informed political debate.

Who knew then what a great thing it was? After the worst thing in 2005 being Bush re-elected, who would have known that the best thing just a year later was that election being rendered almost irrelevant? Time, he can be a funny guy.