Know Your Enemy - Republican Agenda Predictions

The Bush Campaign is under a lot of pressure to announce an agenda for the next four years.  What that agenda will contain can be predicted based on a few influencing factors.  First, Bush's base is eroding around the left edge.  He'll need to shore it up.  Second, he has to bring up his positives so expect some sweetness and light.  Finally, he has to re-engage the swing voters.

More below the fold...

So what specifically can we expect?  Here are a few predictions:

Good News, Sweetness & Light

• Peace - Bush will continue to push the peace button.  He needs to convince people that we're winning WoT.  To do that he'll have to pull back on the terror alerts (though keep a few warnings out there to cover provide enough political cover if something big does happen.)  He'll frame the future as a place of peace and prosperity.
  
• Safety - Start looking for more emphasis of inflated statistics showing how many terrorists have been convicted, how many evil people have been killed, how many countries are working with us, how many security mechanisms have been put in place to make us all safer, how successful everything is that they've done.
  

Securing the Base

• Military & Veterans - There are rumblings that his support in the military is crumbling.  He needs to shore that up.  Expect new military pay raises, elimination of the stop-loss orders, lots of red, white and blue campaign events / Welcome home events on military bases almost but not quite implying that "we've won the war."  Expect talk too of "reforming" veterans benefits or something like that.  Nothing that will pay off in the short term and something that in the longer term will result in lots more money being funneled to big medical corporations and outsourcing.  Wouldn't be surprised to see him suggest that the entire Veterans Administration and VA hospital be totally outsourced
  
• Deficit - He's really pissed off the far right with his deficit spending.  Expect new economic projections based on his inflated exaggerations of how the economy is improving to show how enhanced revenues from taxes will wipe out the deficit in an acceptable time frame while at the same time justify making his tax
  reforms permanent.
  

The Swing Vote

• Corporate Corruption - He's taking a hit on the whole Halliburton drip.  He will boldly produce an initiative to investigate the corruption.  He'll use lots of populist rhetoric.  In the end the investigation will be ham strung and probably allowed to be conducted by one of the stakeholders.  That part won't come out until later.
  
• Job Training & The Future - Bush already pushes the fact that jobs are increasing.  Now he needs to address the fact that so many of those new jobs are in low paying service positions.  He'll do that by trying to convince the under-employed that they too can get a piece of HIS economic boom.  Expect Bush to announce where the next internet bubble will come from and his plans to retrain all the workers to lead that bubble.  Laid off dot commers, you too can take part in the nano-boom (or whatever.)  I won't be surprised if this is targeted at the underemployed middle-class as well.
  
• The Black Vote - He's lost the black vote.  But he'll make a few half hearted attempts to win back a few.  Condi and Colin are due for re-habilitation about now.  Whether Powell will play along remains to be seen.  He'll push diversity at the convention but that will be dismissed for what it is.  Expect a few more initiatives to help the poor that when looked at closely are actually reforms meant to starve the programs.
  
• The Hispanic Vote - We'll be hearing a lot more Spanish from Bush.  Maybe even a whole Spanish paragraph in his acceptance speech.  He'll trot out his Spanish nephew (?).  He'll meet with Mexican officials.  If Bush takes a foreign trip before the election it will be to a Latin country.  He'll keep up the anti-Castro rhetoric.
  
• Health Insurance - Expect a new initiative to reform health care.  Lots of populist indignation about how mired in paperwork the whole medical process is.  Except for a slash at Edward's and the Ambulance Chasers he'll concentrate on how the medical costs have gone up... not because of greed... but because there is too much paperwork in the system (something everyone can identify with.)  Expect HUGE initiatives to get the whole industry into a single database (something medical, law enforcement, insurance special interests etc. would kill for.)  Any reform will actually hide efforts to pump yet more money into the hands of the wealthy.
  

My predictions.  We'll see how they pan out real-soon-now.