“Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s ‘failures’ and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.” — George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger, and Sam Ferguson (via Political Wire)
Hmm…that sounds familiar. (And I certainly wasn't the only blogger who made the point at the time. I don't think it's that progressives have fallen into the trap as much as Democratic partisans, who find it easier to hope they will coast to victory on the idea that anyone could do better than Bush.)
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