THE WORLD'S MOST HATED INDIVIDUAL CLAIMS HE WILL BE AN ASSET ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

At Thursday's White House press conference Bush told reporters he will be a "strong asset" on the campaign trail this election cycle. Was that bravado? Delusion? Stupidity? Ignorance? Was he high? Make up your own mind. The pathetic bunch of pygmies™ running to personify a third even more cataclysmic Bush term have certainly made up their mind(s); they want him to stay away.

To call Bush unpopular among American voters would be a severe understatement and to calculate his impact on Republican candidates on every level as anything less than disastrous would be pie-in-the-sky. Last week SUSA released Bush approval ratings in 15 states:

Alabama- 45%
California- 27%
Iowa- 34%
Kansas- 38%
Kentucky- 41%
Massachusetts- 22%
Minnesota- 29%
Missouri- 39%
New Mexico- 34%
New York- 24%
Ohio- 35%
Oregon- 35%
Virginia- 37%
Washington- 34%
Wisconsin- 33%

Do you think Norm Coleman, a fake moderate who has served as a Bush Regime rubber stamp since the day he was elected and whose own approval rating is an anemic 47% (a sure indication that he'll be a one-term senator) will be inviting Bush to campaign with him in the Twin Cities? And we have the exact same story in Oregon, where Gordon Smith is probably feeling pretty bad that he rubber stamped Bush's whole toxic agenda for the last 7 years while his approval rating sank to the nearly unsalvageable 46%. You think his campaign staff is planning a Bush-Smith whistelstop tour up the 5 from Medford, Eugene, Springfield, and Salem to Beaverton and Portand? Something tells me that's not in the hopper.

"Candidates," insisted the clueless Bush, "who go out and say that helping these Iraqis realize the benefits of democracy are going to do well." Yeah, that's on every American's mind. That and the story about how Saddam Hussein killed Nelson Mandela. Even though virtually all of the pathetic pygmies running for the GOP presidential nomination are running on platforms that are carbon copies of the disastrous Bush agenda, none of them want to be photographed with him and none of them are asking him to join them on the campaign trail. The AP reported today that "Republican presidential candidates can't be any more clear: President Bush isn't welcome on the campaign trail. They would rather choke than even mention his name into a microphone and have all been railing against the status quo.

The candidates are walking a fine line. They are trying to tap into the deep discontent those voters feel about the state of the country without alienating any who hold Bush in high regard. At the same time, they have to counter the Democrats' powerful arguments for a new direction.

How candidates handle the 800-pound elephant in the room now could have implications beyond the primary. Privately, Republican strategists agree their nominee will lose next fall if the general election is a referendum on Bush. They say GOP candidates are wise to distance themselves from the president now, given his unpopularity among the public at large.

It's unlikely that the Democrats are going to let that happen. The Republicans may not want to talk about Bush, but the Democrats will bring him up everyday, ever way on every issue and in every race. And they're just loving the impact Bush and his policies are having on relative fundraising between the two parties. Still, the delusional occupant of the White House, who has been wrong about everything he's uttered a word about, predicts whichever one of the pathetic pygmies™ the GOP throws up will beat Hillary.