Since Bush became President, a lot has changed. Nearly 3 million jobs have been lost, environmental regulations have been gutted and our basic rights and freedoms are now endangered.

Bush lied to the American people, Congress and the U.N. He even said he had “darn good” intelligence on Iraq, despite his disputed State of the Union claim that Baghdad sought to purchase uranium from Africa. Bush provided us with false and deceptive rationales for war in Iraq, and now 287 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of others have died.

We are currently spending more than $4 billion a month in Iraq, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has asked for more. Meanwhile, Americans are desperately looking for work; prisons are packed to an all-time high and crucial programs and services are being cut in order to pay for the Bush administration’s massive military and national security tab. What happened to our budget surplus?

With the guidance of Bush-appointed Attorney General John Ashcroft, our civil liberties have been attacked by the U.S. Patriot Act. Thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI now has the power to access our most private and personal medical and student records, and they don’t even have to tell us it ever happened. Because the Bush administration couldn’t get enough of all that racial profiling, we now have to prepare ourselves for Patriot Act II.

Bush is trying to pack our federal courts with right-wing radicals. He has taken Reagan’s unprecedented politicization of this process to a whole new level. His nominees have been ideological extremists prepared to carry out a pro-corporate, anti-civil rights, anti-environmental and anti-choice agenda. If a federal judge is supposed to fairly interpret the Constitution and the laws governing our country and not be a political activist, then why have people like Deborah Cook been appointed for life to the U.S. Courts?

Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthy are placing debt on our generation. Republicans are cutting initiatives like work-study and making it harder for us to pay for school. Meanwhile, tuition is rapidly increasing at state universities everywhere because education is obviously low on the Bush administration’s priority list. But it doesn’t look like we are going to find jobs anyway, as long as Bush is president. The unemployment rate is currently 6.2 percent.

Education isn’t getting nearly enough funding. Bush is putting taxpayers’ money to use by spending $609 per second on the so-called “war on drugs.”

The only Americans benefiting from the Bush administration are members of the wealthiest one percent of our country. Of course, if the vice president is the former CEO of your company, you’re doing just fine. Isn’t it nice to know that Halliburton is benefiting from all of this?

If the Bush administration wants to “leave no child behind,” then why is it cutting funding for programs such as Head Start? Why are there nearly 10 million children in the U.S. without health care? For that matter, why are there 57 million Americans without health care?

Almost all of the major Democratic candidates have offered health care plans which would expand coverage to millions of Americans. How would they finance it? By repealing various portions of the Bush tax cuts, of course.

But Bush is capable of much more than many of us expected. Who knew he could alienate the United States from the rest of the world, recklessly wage war in the Middle East, while simultaneously attacking ground-breaking decisions such as affirmative action and Roe v. Wade?

Why do Democrats need to win back the White House in 2004?

We need to reverse Bush’s corporate agenda. We need our government to uphold the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the U.S. Constitution. We need to fix the mess, here and abroad.