Message to Democrats: It’s Still the Economy

I haven’t had this much fun reading Letters to The Times since the last presidential election. Back then it was all of the partisan letters about Al Gore and George W. Bush. Now it’s the Republicans thinking they have a mandate and the Democrats thinking they have to retool.

If the Republicans think they have a mandate they are banking on Bush’s own “fuzzy math.” If Sen. Paul Wellstone hadn’t died just before the election and if the Democrats could have pulled off just one of the close elections they lost (e.g., Missouri), where would the Republican mandate be? Of course that didn’t happen, so now the Democrats think they have to figure out something else to run on for the 2004 elections. Let it be said here, and not for the first time, that the Democrats have nothing to fear in two years: It will still be the economy, stupid, regardless of what President Bush does with regard to Iraq.

I’ve been proven wrong before, but I just can’t see the electorate making the same mistake twice. Iraq or any terrorist group that President Bush deems at fault won’t be responsible for the continuing decline of the American economy -- Bush will.

Mark Skurnik

Mission Viejo

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In his Nov. 14 letter, Elmer Richardson uses the GOP’s often-used, supposedly damning, phrase “tax and spend” to bad-mouth the Democrats. When it comes to true fiscal conservatism, I would wager that any economist worth his salt would rate the Democrats far more fiscally conservative than the Republicans and their years of “borrow and spend.” The $3-trillion national debt left by President Reagan after his eight years in office still remains unpaid, and it’s obvious that President Bush is hell-bent on increasing it. True conservatives pay their bills and do not borrow.

James R. Gallagher

Huntington Beach

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Re “House Democrats Make History in Electing Pelosi,” Nov. 15: San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s ascendance to Democratic minority leader in the House is the second shoe dropping in an ominous and dangerous dance of national leadership spinning outward away from the middle ground that is the bedrock of American values and inclinations. The Democrats are refusing to aggressively confront the perpetrators of global terrorism by moving further to the left, while the Republicans refuse to inject fiscal medicine into a degenerating economy. Meanwhile, the American public is so centrist that the midterm elections were still another vote mainly for a 50/50 split. Woe to the deserted center for common sense!

Jeff Schoenwald

Thousand Oaks

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Nothing is so myopic as a partisan point of view. This is evidenced by Michael Ramirez’s political cartoon (Commentary, Nov. 14) depicting Pelosi as too far to the left. Obviously he has been blind for years to the more-than-far-right position of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). This guy makes Pat Buchanan seem calm and reasonable. But political cartoonists have to make a living, and who would buy Ramirez’s doodles if he bothered to check his memory banks?

Bob Loza

Burbank