By Wes Pedersen
Who made the really big comebacks of the election? Jerry Brown and George W. Bush.
Plus Newt Gingrich.
Brown hacked out a win against Meg Whitman and Big Money to give Californians a chance to embrace off-to-the-left liberalism again. By all manner of logic, Whitman deserved to win. She had the cash to buy a slice of California outright; Brown had a reputation for flakiness and Jimmy Carterisms, but he lived them down.
Californians, it seems, weren’t ready to sell the Golden State down the river to the highest bidder.
Bush has now been re-certified as capable of being a senior Republican adviser.
He can come back to Washington safely now to accept accolades for his role as a maker of the template for economic disaster and to do so in the company of such other greats as Dick Cheney, whom Bush now says he kept on despite serious doubts about his vice president’s fitness for the job.
In their zeal to grease the skids for Obama’s descent into political oblivions, voters have inadvertently called back the political hacks of the Bush II era.
One of the revitalized experts on good governance, by his own accounting, is Gingrich.
He retooled his earlier vision for a GOP rightist America this year, pronounced it new, and sent it into off to the anti-liberal press as the equivalent of a Bill of Rights for political and business ultra-conservatives.
The basic problem for all of the gentlemen cited here is that now they will have do something to prove that they are not the political zombies they appear to be on any examination of election results. They have got to do something in the coming two years or be lost forever in the annals of twice failed pretenders.
Bush, in his new biography, shows himself yearning for the perks of presidency. Even though Bushism is now officially back in Washington favor, he would do well to avoid any advisory role in the new politics.
He should remain, as Jimmy Carter has, convinced of his own correctness, but he should do so with no involvement the continuing mess too many people remember was of his own creation.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |