Why I Supported Bush in 2000

As promised, I’ll talk a little about why I supported President George W. Bush in the 2000 Election.  Well, I’ll start by saying that Kingston is a pretty direct surrogate for me here.  Pretty much everything he says is the way I felt at the time.

I was in high school and had never really been interested in politics too any great extent before.  Sure, I liked Clinton and followed his Presidency, but I wasn’t too involved with politics beyond that (aside from studying them from a historical standpoint).  Fun fact, President Clinton and I both were born on August 19th, and thus share a birthday.

So as Clinton’s time came to an end we were left with his uninspired second in command, Al Gore, or the exciting young upstart ready to pick things up where his dad left off, George W. Bush.

I hated Gore, and was really disappointed when the democrats chose him to run.  He was just so boring, hadn’t seemed to have done anything to prove himself, and was just riding Clinton’s coattails.  Meanwhile old W. was full of charisma, big ideas and had the wisdom of his father to back him up (or so I thought).  I felt the first Bush had done a pretty decent job, though I’ll admit I hadn’t really paid too much attention to him.

I was not pledged to any political party (I’m still not, though the democrats let me vote in their primaries for some reason) so I did not really feel any strong political allegiance.  The republicans had not done a lot to vilify themselves in my eyes, so I was very open to either side.

Of course I was not super well researched on the issues, and used my basic knowledge plus all the campaign hype to help make my decision.  And thus I supported Bush.  It was the first time that I really felt invested in an election and followed it closely.

All the chicanery at the end was so blatant, it was kind of disgusting, even as a Bush supporter.  Still, I celebrated it with the idea that “we” had really stole something and pulled one over on America.  It was an angry victory.

I assumed he would go on to have a rather uneventful lame duck presidency, and I maintain he would have if it weren’t for 9/11.  Under those circumstances it is easy to believe a lot of these conspiracy theories about Bush having prior knowledge of the attacks and being involved in them himself.

Of course that is all conjecture, and none of the evidence is definitive.  A lot of people like to say Gore would not have handled 9/11 as well as Bush, but I think that is highly debatable.  I mean, how well did Bush actually handle it, in hindsight?

Anyway, I quickly grew to hate Bush for all his stupid quirks, lies, flawed policies and power grabbing.  So by 2004 when it was reelection time I was staunchly against him.  If the democrats had a stronger opponent than Kerry I believe they had the potential to slaughter Bush, but they seemed to focus on the “anyone but Bush” aspect, which was just not a strong enough approach.

Of course the Republicans took the reelection as a mandate from the general public to proceed the course, if not to ramp everything to a new level.

Yuck, this was not a fun write, and reminds me of my teenage frustrations.  Of course part of those frustrations fueled me to start Black Snow, so you can thank Bush for that.

Hopefully I didn’t just turn a bunch of you off by revealing my politics or lack of political savvy, and I promise not to go political on you very often.  Especially not directly in the comics.  In fact I see this comic (and the last) more as making fun of the young liberal culture than anything else.

Don’t worry, the next one is about something more silly.