Lets face it America, in the past few years we haven’t had a stunning array of presidential candidates to choose from. Our current president, George W. Bush, is a disappointment, even to die hard conservatives. Aside from his hard-line on terror and the wise notion to cut taxes, Bush has offered little in the way of real leadership on a number of issues. But the Bush presidency has become typical of America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It has been two decades since we have had a quality president in Ronald Reagan and even the most objective observers would have to admit that by the late 80s Reagan was certainly past his prime. Some leftist would cheer at the notion that Bush is a disappointment, but their jubilation is undeserved. The democrats haven’t offered a quality candidate since 1960. Johnson was palatable, but his Great Society efforts and the debacle of Vietnam, preclude his name from further consideration. The truth of the matter is, quality people no longer seek the presidency, only political hacks like John Kerry and Al Gore and in some cases honest men, who are clearly over their head, like George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Why is it that the presidency has become a breading ground for mediocrity? This has happened before in our history. In the period after Andrew Jackson, before the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, most people (aside from history buffs) would be hard pressed to identify a quality president from that era, the same can be said for the period after Lincoln but before the emergence of Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century. Now again, America appears cursed by mediocrity. Politics is largely to blame for this curse. Quality men (and women) are turned off by the virulent nature of today’s party politics. Those that do survive the gauntlet, are too badly bruised to inspire collective support, take Bush and his immediate predecessor Clinton, both are universally hated by the opposition. Politics is synonymous with hypocrisy, as we noted earlier, the left’s hypocritical stance on Iraq is typical of today’s political minefield. While we can applaud Bush for taking a stand against terrorism, unlike Clinton before him, and while we can rejoice in the fact that he had the wherewithal to push through badly needed tax cuts. Bush has been mediocre at best on practically ever other issue. His inability, to articulate his position and respond decisively to leftist attacks, makes his position all the more untenable. His embrace of greater bureaucracy and tepid social security reform efforts leave much to be desired. If we can say anything about the Democrats, however, we can certainly say that they are excellent “politicians” they have succeeded in almost every way in their effort to undermine Bush’s presidency (and Bush has to some extent cooperated), they have convinced America that we are on the verge of a eminent doom and sought to undermine the war on terror and the economy, for these reasons they ought never regain the presidency, but we can ill afford another term of W either. Alas for our poor country…