My View: Second-Term Bush Must Unite

By News Director Bob Longo

POSTED: 4:15 pm EST November 3, 2004

Free at last!

I feel free to finally move on to writing columns about something besides the political landscape. Not a promise, mind you. Rather, an inclination.

To paraphrase President George W. Bush, I'll call it my Season of Hope.

But before I do, some finishing thoughts.

Repeat after me: "I will not believe exit polls. Not now, not tomorrow. Never!"

I feel so included and privileged when I get the information, like a kid who got to peek inside the Christmas gifts under the tree. Later, I feel like the jilted bride, left at the altar by a man she never really knew.

Can we all just learn to get along? Can we? Rodney King wondered the now-famous phrase and later crossed the line himself, but can our leaders, people who politic for a living, learn to set their political differences aside after the election and lead? Is that too much to ask?

History will decide whether this was "the most important election" in generations, as was commonly touted in the media. History and Bush, who now must set aside differences and act as a unifier. In his Wednesday afternoon speech in Washington, D.C., he acknowledged the need and accepted the role. That's good for us all.

Without a mandate in 2000, he promised a climate of inclusion. He promised that his administration would be capable of compromise and shared goals with his opponents. And in fact, early on and in the months directly following 9/11, it certainly seemed so. But this two-year election campaign has been brutally divisive -- politically, and to the nation in general.

Can a second-term Bush be a uniter? Can he set aside some of the far-right viewpoints that helped put him over the top in places like Ohio? Set them aside to the same irrelevant place the equally far-out left ideas have been relegated to, and move his agenda more to the center?

Certainly, it would be easy not to, now that he has an even stronger Republican-controlled House and Senate. But that's the kind of courage a true leader exhibits. And that's what this nation needs now.

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