Reader Warner makes a critical point about the “blame Bush” strategy that I and the Obama campaign are perhaps underemphasizing.  I made the point yesterday that “The fact that Americans are now focused on the serious business of government and are now forced to confront the absolute failure of the Bush administration” benefits Barack Obama.  Warner responds:

The problem with this statement is that is incomplete, so incomplete as to be dangerously inaccurate.

And everyone keeps making it, Dem pols, media, bloggers, and presidential candidates.

The complete truth is:

“The fact that Americans are now focused on the serious business of government and are now forced to confront the absolute failure of republican policies (read neo-con, the defacto Republican party) and the Bush administration.”

The danger in continuing to make this error of omission is allowing the opinion to grow that getting rid of GWB is the solution, it’s not, it’s dealing with Republican policies and governance. I mean the actual policies not the apple pie memes; no government/small efficient govt., war profiteering/strong national defense, no regulation/minimal regulation, corporate welfare/pro-business, and on and on…

The problem with John McCain is not that he voted like Bush 90% of the time the problem is that both men are 100% committed to the Republican ideology.

Right.  The danger of running so hard against George Bush and attributing so many of America’s problems to his failed leadership is that it gives a pass to failed Republican policies that have been in place nearly uncontested for eight years, policies that largely won’t change under John McCain.  We didn’t get into a financial crisis that now requires a trillion-dollar taxpayer funded fix because of George Bush poor management skills, we got into this mess because George Bush followed the Republican party ideology of deregulation, the infallibility of the free market, and unwavering faith in the upstanding morals of CEOs and hedge fund managers.

The “blame Bush” strategy, if focused too much on the man and not the policies, actually plays right into John McCain’s hands.  McCain would love for Americans to blame the current Wall Street crisis on Bush’s poor management, not failed ideology.  Which is why McCain’s first major response was to call for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox (Actually, McCain initially wanted to fire the FEC chairman– oops).  The problem, McCain would like us to believe, is not that trickle-down economics is fundamentally garbage, the problem is that this guy screwed it up!  And all those other problems?  That guy in the White House did it.

Right now, Democrats may be running too hard against Bush and not hard enough against a Republican party whose entire platform has been taken over by Cold War-era neocons, single-issue extremists, and rich people whose money and interests lie primarily in overseas countries.  The fact is that George Bush will be gone on January 20, 2009; George Bush will lose this election no matter what.  But that doesn’t mean the Republicans will.