President Bush fired back at his Democratic critics Monday night. After being a sitting duck for the slings and arrows fired at him by the “Hate Bush Brigade”, the White House says the President plans to go on the offensive.

It’s about time. We need to see a tough, straight-talking, Texas-style George Bush hammering away at his detractors. He also needs to reach out to his conservative base and remind them of what’s at stake in this election, because he has a problem with a lot of them.

In recent weeks my conservative listeners have been talking about the same things Kerry and Edwards have been talking about. They’re talking about jobs even though the unemployment rate is only 5.6 percent. They’re talking about outsourcing, they’re talking about amnesty for illegal aliens – these are the things that people who listen to talk radio are concerned about.

Their reaction to the President’s handling of these issues should be a warning sign for the President. Conservatives are calling my show and telling me that they are not going to vote for George Bush because of his stand on amnesty or outsourcing, for example. And this simply amazes me. I ask them if they aren’t going to vote to re-elect George Bush are they going to vote for the Democrat? And the answer is inevitably, “NO! I’m not going to vote for anybody. I’m going to stay home on Election Day.”

My reply is if you stay home and George Bush doesn’t win re-election and instead Kerry or whoever the Democrat candidate is gets elected, do you think things are going to get really better? And their answer is, “Well, no, but I want to take a stand.”

They should remember Custer. He too took a stand. It was his last.

That just stuns me because it’s utterly irrational. They don’t understand they are taking a stand against themselves. By not voting they only help elect a liberal Democrat who wants to raise their taxes, enact all kinds of new spending programs. They would also endanger the nation by their already demonstrated ineptness and weakness in the war on terror, and hand over Iraq to the United Nations so it can create the same kind of mess we are now seeing in Haiti – another UN and Clinton “success.”

They are wearing blinders that only allow them to focus on one issue. They say they won’t vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on one single issue even though he agrees with them on every other issue. It’s utterly self-defeating.

Even though they staunchly support George Bush on his stands on tax cuts, how he is fighting the war, and applaud his pro-life policies, they disagree with him on the amnesty issue, for example, and therefore can’t bring themselves to vote for him.

They’ll just stay home and help elect a Democrat who disagrees with them on just about everything. They’d enact socialist programs that would cripple U.S. industry, yet some of my listeners applaud them not realizing that if you drive a company’s profits down, you drive the value of their stock down and the millions of Americans whose 401Ks are invested in that firm suffer losses as a result.

When President Bush goes on the offensive, he’s going to have to remind Americans that if they want to pay low prices for the goods they need, the reason they are going to have to look overseas is because Democrats in Congress have so regulated American companies that the cost of doing business has risen.

That’s due to the unions and government regulations that have become so prohibitive.

What’s the Democrat answer? Well, they say they’d make foreign nations enact the same kind of onerous regulatory and environmental burdens we have here that would force the prices of their goods up to the same level as ours. In other words, wreck their own economies to make John Kerry or some other demagogue look good.

Fat chance.

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Comments to mereagan@hotmail.com

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(c)2004 Mike Reagan.

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