Apparently, Bush's plans for a resurrected second term are now 20% less reality-based:
In his State of the Union address, Bush will propose so little "that one bewildered Republican advisor calls it ‘an insult to incrementalism.'" However, following the mid-term elections, Bush "wants to devote the last two years of his presidency to a grand fix of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."
So the plan is to propose nothing that'd halt Bush's current slide into Poochie-esque popularity levels, suffer major losses in the 2006 midterms, and then completely heal all the country's entitlement programs -- a surely unpopular task -- when his duck is at its lamest. Truly daring.
The only way this plan tiptoes into coherency is after a Democratic landslide -- that way, he can cut deals with a liberal Congress, making legislative progress while gamely protesting his inability to rein in the spendthrift impulses of liberals. Think Reagan 1986. Otherwise, his attempts to privatize Social Security already failed, his expansion of Medicare barely passed and is widely regretted, and Republican efforts to slash Medicaid were largely mitigated through bipartisan pressure. He'd be better off bringing peace to the Middle East.
