Eideard

George W. Bush and one of his cheerleaders

About two-thirds of Americans believe Republican former U.S. President George W. Bush is responsible for the nation’s struggling economy, with a smaller percentage blaming Democratic President Barack Obama, a Gallup poll showed on Thursday…

Isn’t that a brilliant sentence? Cripes – if Bush gets 68% that only leaves 32% for the balance. I hope some editor gets the blame for making Susan Heavey include that.

Independent voters, who could play a critical role in the November election, were more likely to blame Bush (67 percent) than Obama (51 percent)…

Many Americans are still struggling to recover financially from the nation’s deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Obama is trying to regroup after recent setbacks, including an anemic May jobs report.

“Americans continue to place more blame for the nation’s economic problems on George W. Bush than on Barack Obama, even though Bush left office more than three years ago,” Gallup said. “… This suggests that Obama’s argument that he is on the right track and needs more time to turn the economy around could fall on receptive ears, particularly those of independents…”

Critics say Bush’s tax cuts combined with increased spending to fight two wars, among other costs, helped plunge the nation into a deep economic crisis.

If you care to round out the blame game, you might consider the role of corporate lobbying in the buying and selling of our elected representatives in Congress. It was Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America in 1994 that set the ground rules [a] for increasing the power of lobbyists by 400 to 1000% – and [b] establishing the Republican protocol of blocking any possible progress by a Democratic administration – even if that includes stopping the passage of any useful bipartisan legislation.

Meanwhile, add in Bush policies that freed the whole range of property speculators from storefront mortgage brokers to proprietary trades in mortgage-backed securities from oversight and regulation. A deeper and more pernicious vein of Republican corruption that also tracks back to Bush and his handlers.