It’s hard to believe but it was just one year ago that President Bush took his second oath of office as this nation’s forty-third president, amongst hope and goodwill that he and his Republican Party cronies had a definitive mandate by his re-election win over Democrat John Kerry, and were going to finally begin solving many of the long-term problems facing this country.

But that was then, and this is now and a lot has changed in the world of Washington in the last twelve months.

So even although George W. Bush’s name will not be on any of the voting ballots in the upcoming mid-term 2006 elections the voters in the precincts across the country will have him on their minds as they choose who will be their congressional representatives for the two remaining years of the president’s second term.

Mr. Bush has three years left in this term and has discovered that he has spent all of the ‘political capital’ he himself stated he had earned in his 2004 win. He must now obviously rule this country as a lame-duck caretaker without much public support for any new legislative initiatives he wishes to promote because such support for costly additional programs have evaporated.

So how did he and his administration quickly self-destruct in this second term when everything seemed so positive for the Republicans at the beginning of 2005 since they controlled the executive branch, both houses of the legislative branch and put a confirmed conservative as this country’s newest Supreme Court Chief Justice? Was it complacency or arrogance after so many years in power? Or a combination of both?

The problem for the president as we approach the mid-term elections is that the war in Iraq is still unresolved to the satisfaction of the American public, the growing political lobbyist scandals and the admission that he authorized the audio surveillance of Americans outside the parameters of currently held standards which have not helped the Republican Party cause to the American public in these last few months.

But is the Democratic Party still relevant as a major political force and can mount a challenge to the party in power or are they about to become a forgotten alternative with diminished influence and relevance in the political world as they were during much of the late 1800’s when they lost eleven of thirteen presidential elections? They lost the presidential contests in 2004 and 2000, thanks to a lack of support in the southern part of the country, and lost both houses of Congress in 1994. Is there any chance of them becoming a national party of influence once again as the nation continues a population shift towards the south and west?

But let’s face facts. The old-time Democratic Party of FDR and LBJ is dead and should stay buried. But can a new political entity emerge from those one-time ‘tax and spend’ days dating to Franklin Roosevelt and re-claim a voice for millions of Americans who are becoming increasingly disillusioned over the ruling Republican Party exactly ten months before the election?

The Democrats have been out of the public’s favor before. Between 1860 and 1912 they only won two presidential contests, electing Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892, making him the only president to serve non-consecutive terms. They only got back into power in 1912 in a three-way race when Woodrow Wilson was elected over Republican incumbent William Taft and Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt and all he did was give us World War One. FDR took over as president in 1933 and, except for a brief period after WW2 and when the Republicans controlled the Senate in the early 1980’s, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress until the 1994 Republican Revolution changed the political power structure in the nation’s capital.

The Republicans have controlled Congress since then and the White House since 2001 on promising the end of big government. Yet, since this Bush became president, the growth of the federal government and the nation’s public debt has grown out of control, causing millions of American voters to become upset with the Bush Administration. Could the Democrats capitalize on this?

It can be argued that the Republican Party has abandoned its core supporters, the once disgruntled middle-class Democrats who elected Ronald Reagan as president. Democrats did well in the 2005 off-year elections, winning two governorships and watching Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar lose all of the ballot initiatives he had endorsed, so there must be growing voter resentment against the current party in power. The Democrats could promote voter anger against the Republicans since the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress for twelve years on the promise of reduced government spending, yet not only has that spending not been reduced it’s been dramatically increased under Bush’s war on terror and the undercutting of our freedoms.

If the Democrats could retake the House for 2007 then the last two years of President Bush’s ambitious agenda of spending our grandchildren’s money could be curtailed. And the American public could finally observe public hearings on what has been going on in Iraq and the other places in the world this administration has sent our troops to. That could also help the Democrats own cause for the 2008 presidential race when Bush is termed out and both parties will have to field new candidates with new agendas for the future.

Plus, the Democrats can bring up the corruption issue. Senator Bill Frist and Congressman Tom Delay are being investigated on ethics and corruption charges and California Republican Congressman Randall ‘Duke’ Cunningham resigned his seat in November, 2005 and pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from military contractors in exchange for political favors. Then there’s the Jack Abramoff scandal.

The pundits on the recent Sunday morning political talk shows were discussing the implications of Washington lobbyist Abramoff’s guilty plea on federal charges of bribery and influence peddling. And since most of his clients were Republican lawmakers it would seem that the GOP, obviously, has to be more embarrassed and nervous by his guilty admission as the mid-term elections approach. You can tell that the public relations spinning has already begun as the Republicans, starting with President Bush on down, are attempting to minimize their relationship to Abramoff. Having the party out of power yell corruption and complicity against the one in control never hurts since both groups have used that charge to weaken the other over these last two centuries.

But if the Democrats want to take back one or both houses of Congress and give Bush fits during his last two years of office then the one issue they should definitely focus on is the current illegal invasion across our borders by millions of citizens of other countries. Why the Democrats tacitly support such illegal activity by those individuals is difficult to understand when it’s obvious that the undercutting of wages by those ‘workers’ reduce the number of jobs previously done by the U.S. middle class labor force who were the backbone of the Democratic Party from 1932 to 1980.

Should the Democrats use the immigration issue to their advantage in 2006? Absolutely. The Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona declared in the fall of 2005 an emergency in dealing with the flood of illegals pouring over their borders facing Mexico and even New York Senator and presumed 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been talking tough on solving our immigration problems. The Republican leadership is attempting a smoke and mirror campaign of allowing an amnesty plan over the next twelve years for those already here, yet allegedly preventing future undocumented workers from crossing into our country by beefing up our border defenses. But that was tried in 1987 under Ronald Reagan and was a failure because there was no true attempt to control the influx of undocumented immigrants.

The Republicans have written off blue-collar workers with their pursuit of free trade policies throughout the world. The Democrats should pursue these middle-class Americans who have soured on Mr. Bush and his globalist friends if they want to take back Congress in 2006 with a goal of winning the White House in 2008. Otherwise, more of the same will take place in Washington with the current status quo of representation. Which, in layman’s terms, means that nothing will be done.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com