What do we do now?

The best thing that can happen for people like me is for President Bush to lose his political base in Congress. He seems to be doing a good job of this.
Richard Nixon, a smoking gun aimed at his heart, used the “power base” option when he resigned the presidency in 1974. “Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate,” he said in his resignation speech, “I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me . . . however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. . . From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.
“I have never been a quitter,” he said. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
Losing his political base in Congress gave Richard Nixon an out. It is the best hope that we – people like me – have, to be rid of President Bush before the 2008 election. It is not a happy option for us, or anybody. We wish, instead of hoping for his resignation, that we were cheering his presidency.
Instead, we believe that President Bush does not care about us. We are the people in the first three words of the preamble to the Constitution. We are Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who write letters to the editor – I read one this morning – thinking that creation of a third party, a party dedicated to democratic process, is our best resort. We are not polarized politically, or even ideologically. After five years of Mr. Bush, we are polarized chronologically. We are polarized against the past, and for the future.
For us, “the future is now” could not be soon enough. We know Mr. Bush does not care about us. We also know that is the second-worst thing about it. The worst thing is if he DID care for us. It is no solace to us if his millions of supporters are getting nervous. They are no less stuck with his incompetence and, worse, his indifference, than we are. They are no less betrayed than we, who are mobilizing in an unprecedented way to the news about the phone call database.
His rationale is national security. Whose? Ours? If the principle of six degrees of separation is valid, the millions of us are connected, in this database, to target numbers. How do we feel about that? Are we ready to trade privacy for inquisition? What is the price paid, in lost freedom and confidence, in Mr. Bush’s effort to find a needle in a haystack? In the summer of 2001, according to the analyses, his administration couldn’t find a needle in a candybar. That must be a difficult reality for a president to live with, but not justification to end-run the checks and balances that are the real source of our security.
God knows George W. Bush is not a quitter. He may, though, after the phone thing is weighed against the Fourth Amendment, be nearing the point where the political base convinces him that the easy way out, for him, for them, and for us, as traumatic as it may be, is, as Mr. Nixon counseled, “to put the interests of America first,” and get the hell out.