Are vetoes the key to a Bush recovery?

Bush’s aides have indicated he’ll also veto:

• The same bill he vetoed last year on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
• A measure requiring the government to negotiate discounts with pharmaceutical firms that sell drugs to Medicare.
• The “Employee Free Choice Act” which strengthens labor unions by abolishing the requirement that elections at a workplace to determine whether workers want to unionize be conducted by secret ballot.

Each of these bills passed the House earlier this year, but not by a veto-proof majority. None has yet been considered by the Senate. It seems almost certain that Bush’s vetoes of them will be sustained.

Bush not on '08 ballot, but vetoes will be
Even though Bush himself won’t be on the 2008 ballot, his vetoes will be. Democrats will re-fight the veto battles all over again next year, highlighting any Republican in a competitive district — such as Rep. Jim Walsh of Syracuse, N.Y.— who supports Bush on Iraq, embryonic stem cell funding, and other issues.

Cameron said that since Bush and the Democrats agree on so few things, “very quickly both sides will run out of easy deals. Given the President's policy preferences it will generally be easier for Congress to try to win via overrides rather than appealing to the President. Which means veto over-ride players — like say, Senator Chuck Hagel, R- Neb. — will emerge as critical players.”

If a presidential rejection always means “vetoing the will of the American people,” in Sen. Clinton’s words, one has to assume that Congress reflects the will of the people when it passes legislation.

Congress passed the bill restraining Medicare spending growth in 1995, but when President Clinton vetoed it, he did so on the hunch that he, not GOP leaders Dole and Gingrich, correctly read the minds of the electorate.

As Dole’s advisor Burke said one month after the 1996 election, “One of the things the Clinton campaign bet on, and I think correctly so, was that there was a predisposition to believe Republicans were mean.”

Burke then told President Clinton's pollster Mark Penn, who is now Hillary Clinton’s pollster, “You bet on that perception, and you invested in building on that perception and it was very successful… because it confirmed all of the people’s worst fears — (that) we (Republicans) hated the safety-net programs, we didn’t care about the blind and the lame….”

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