A lame duck is an incumbent who has been defeated for reelection, not any outgoing elected official. Therefore, President Bush is no lame duck. This point is important because the constant referrals of him as such has helped to diminish his influence.

A president-elect is one who has been elected president, but not yet taken office. Barak Obama will likely be elected president the first Monday after the second Wednesday (December 15) by the members of the Electoral College. All that has been decided thus far was which Electors have been elected. Therefore, Obama is not yet the president-elect.

 Winston Churchill had led the British to victory in the Second World War, yet in the first post-war election, he was not reelected prime minister.  Victimized by his own success, the British people in peacetime were free to focus on other matters and elected the opposition party instead.

 Similarly, George W. Bush’s Republican Party will be replaced by its opponents after having successfully kept the United States homeland free from a major terrorist attack for more than seven years, which allowed American voters to focus on lesser matters.  But the Republicans nonetheless should not have suffered the same fate as Churchill’s Conservatives.

 With Bush’s low poll ratings, Democrats made the election a referendum on the Bush Administration.  They and other critics used forms of the word failure in every sentence in which they mentioned Bush.  Fearful Republicans distanced themselves from Bush instead of defending him, while the confident president focused on continuing to perform his duties instead of defending his own record.  With the premise that Bush was a failure accepted as a given during the campaign, Republicans often prefaced specific issues of disagreement with Democrats by emphasizing points of disagreement with Bush, which only further undermined voter confidence in the Republican Party.

 With Bush’s respectable record of successes, the need for change could have been emphasized in certain focused areas, while continuity should have been stressed in other areas.  Instead, voters demanded wholesale change from Bush policies, regardless of whether they even agreed with all of the Democrats’ proposals.

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