September 5, 2004 - I am troubled by President Bush’s record with the Texas Air National Guard. It is not that he was able to avoid being drafted by joining the guard. It isn’t even that he used family influence to get into the guard. My cousins, Jeff and Craig, satisfied their military obligation by joining the Illinois National Guard in 1968; taking six months of training and then showing up for drills every second weekend for the next 7 ½ years. They spent two weeks each summer in beautiful Camp Ripley, Wisconsin making meals for Wisconsin mosquitoes. Their service with the guard was not without risk. Their unit was not mobilized for Vietnam. The closest they came to combat was when they were called out for riot duty at the University of Illinois in 1970. Unlike their counterparts in Ohio, they were not ordered to “lock and load”. They completed their service obligation and were discharged in 1976. Jeff, who is now practicing law in Champaign, was discharged as a Sergeant. So was my brother but he earned his stripes in Vietnam – and yes in Cambodia as one of the troops that President Nixon denied were there.

My problem with the President is not that he avoided Vietnam by joining the guard. It is not even that he was jumped over 500 other applicants because of his family influence. My uncle got his son’s billets secured using the contacts he built up after he left the Army Air Corps as a Colonel in 1948. What troubles me is that he did not finish what he started when he joined up. I take him at his word that he joined TANG because he wanted to be a pilot like his old man. He got the training. He learned to fly, but then when it came to the follow up he couldn’t stay the course.

His business career followed the same model. He would get a business started but when the going was tough and the business was hanging on the edge of survival, he bailed out and sold out. He seemed to be in a holding pattern, hanging on until something better came along. He continued that pattern into politics, holding on to the Texas governorship until something better came along. It was just one more example of business left unfinished.

That is the same pattern he has shown in his Presidency. He sent the posse to get the bad guys in Afghanistan but when the evildoers rode out of the canyon he called the Rangers back to send them somewhere else. Unfinished business. He started out to reform the nation’s education system. When the time came to pay the bills he looked away. Unfinished business. When American workers needed the assistance of the government to extend their unemployment benefits the President was not to be found. When the Senate passed a bill to fund his excursion to Baghdad, the one that Senator Kerry voted for the President threatened a veto unless the provision to pay for it was removed. He left the business of paying for his war unfinished.

Unfinished business has been the pattern of George W. Bush’s life, as a young and irresponsible adult, a period lasting until his 40th birthday; as an oil entrepreneur; and as a politician. Unfinished business has been the pattern of his Presidency. The unfinished business of the cost of his Presidency has been left behind, an inevitable sharp tax increase for our children and grandchildren to pay.