President McCain put down his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. The 72 year old had only been in office for six months and already its draining effects were beginning to take a serious toll on his mental and physical health. The re-election of Ahmadinejad signaled, he believed, a final suppression of what was once thought to be the simmering glow of real democracy in the Middle East. With 100,000 American troops still stationed in Iraq, any military action taken against Tehran would have to weighed against the further inflaming the Iraqi civil war. Of course, there was still the concern of the Taliban re-emerging in Pakistan and Afghanistan. President McCain was having trouble convincing the American people that a “surge” of American troops was needed in both conflicts. Despite a solidly Republican Congress, the massive bloodshed from the last few years had taken a toll on the nation’s willingness to send more young men and women into what seemed like a meat grinder.
Turning his thoughts to domestic issues, McCain recalled the fight to get his major tax cut stimulus bill through Congress. While it took several vetoes to rid the legislation of pork, it finally passed and taxes on the American people were at historic lows. Still, a growing chorus of commentators, Paul Krugman foremost among them, had been warning the administration that its reckless fiscal policy was inviting huge debt and a return of inflation. All in due time, thought the President to himself. I inherited the worst economy in decades from President Kerry, he said to himself. For all my flaws, I haven’t responded in as haphazard a manner as he did – shutting down the campaign in September to return to the White House and push a $700 billion bank bailout.
At least, McCain thought, he had a chance not to go down in history like Kerry would. No, McCain wasn’t elected to office losing the popular vote by millions, but winning Ohio with only a few thousand ballots of questionable integrity. Republicans never really gave Kerry a chance after that. Still, Kerry handled himself poorly in office. His first decisions to push for substantial increases in federal spending on health and education were stifled by strong Republican majorities in the Congress. The man from Massachusetts was able to pull out several Army divisions from Iraq, but that only seemed to invite more chaos in that country. McCain had fought that withdrawal vigorously, even filibustering a funding bill in the hopes that Kerry would adopt his strategy of sending more troops to Mesopotamia. He failed and instead of a coherent strategy for success, the United States seemed to drift along in Iraq for four years – too few soldiers to do anything, too many for the insurgents to overwhelm. All the while, causalities increased as Kerry was caught between two polarizing forces – hawkish Republicans who ridiculed his every move and a liberal base increasingly disenchanted with his “strategic withdrawal.”
Still, for all of the country’s problems, the Republican Party had never been in a better position. Sure, it had lost the White House in ‘04, but after Kerry’s meandering response to Hurricane Katrina, his failure to get anything close to a domestic agenda through Congress and the public’s’ attribution of Iraq failures to the White House, Democrats got swamped in the ‘06 midterms. The ‘08 Republican primary went into full drive in the winter of ‘06 – ‘07 and from then on Kerry’s every move was put in the context of political survival. By the time the stock market tanked and the banks began to go under in September of ‘08, it was generally accepted that McCain would win the presidency. Democrats were blamed with causing the worst financial crisis in a century. In the end in was a GOP landslide in the electoral college – 355 to 183.
There was no time to fixate on the past now though. President McCain had plenty to keep him occupied in the present. Putting back on his eye glasses, the President picked up the next briefing report.
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