Not Your Sweetie

At his website, Josh Marshall characterizes the Bush ads this way:

"If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main --probably the main -- theme of his reelection campaign: it's not my fault.

"Yes, there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy's been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There's all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it's not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn't have anything to do with. That was Clinton's fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn't my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn't completely work out. But that's the CIA's fault. So if there's anything that's bad now it's not because of anything I did. It's because of 9/11. And if it's not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don't blame me.

"Now, I think that does pretty much sum up what the president and the White House are telling the public. But it's important to draw back and recognize that up until this point that argument has largely worked. Now, however, I think people are beginning to question the argument… Thus the new ads, the message of which might fairly be summed up as 'It's midnight in America. But if the Democrats were in, the sun might never come up!'"
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_29.html#002623