Hey, it's only 613 days to the presidential election!
Everyone seems to be in a terrific hurry to get on to the next president. That could be why an assassination attempt on the current VP was dismissed as such a ho-hum non-event in the media. It barely made the bottom of my newspaper's front page.
But there is a long way to go before #44 steps into office. With all the chief executive wannabes elbowing each other to get to the front microphone, and with President Bush's natural aversion to media exposure (who can blame him for that?), it's easy to overlook the fact that we have nearly two years to go under the present administration.
It's way too soon to try to assess the success or failure of George W. Bush's two terms. Historians will wrangle over it long after I'm gone, but it would be interesting to see what the final consensus will be.
There are plenty of issues on which I disagree with our president, most notably illegal immigration. I also think he is an abysmally poor communicator, and I don't mean just Texas drawling. He has done next to nothing in educating the country about the dangers we face from radical Islam. If he doesn't want to spend his time explaining it, the least he could do is recommend Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower.
But I'll say this for President Bush. The man is not afraid of poll numbers. He's willing to take all kinds of criticism, ridicule, insult, conflict and abuse if he's confident in the decisions he makes. The liberals may call him stupid, stubborn, and much worse, but that further proves the point that Bush's unshakeable tenacity is the hallmark of a strong character.
Over the long haul of time, I think that fact is going to trump a lot of others.
