War Room
Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011 21:01 ET
The true cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking
By Gene Lyons
►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/08/03/gene_lyons_bush&source=newsletter
The true cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking
"The mystery has always been why any Democrat would have wanted to follow the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush. To understand why, it’s necessary to revisit ancient history, specifically 2001. Given today’s TV- and Internet-shortened time horizon, that’s almost like invoking the Napoleonic Wars, but bear with me.
Thanks partly to his skill at “triangulation” — seeking middle ground between left and right — President Clinton left a legacy of prosperity and balanced budgets. Republicans impeached him anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Clinton’s spectacular folly gave GOP hard-liners the excuse they’d spent his entire presidency looking for. That’s not the point. To the Limbaugh-led, Confederate-accented Republican right, all Democrats are illegitimate. President Barack Obama often acts as if he doesn’t understand that.
Anyway, let’s stick to what’s relevant today: taxes, spending and the U.S. economy. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, had the nation maintained the fiscal course the Clinton administration laid out, the national debt everybody rants about would have been retired by 2009.
See, that’s the real cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking. By any rational accounting, Bush and the GOP Congress that gave him everything he wanted from 2001 to 2007 should be held responsible for the entire $10.6 trillion national debt — along with the $1.3 trillion yearly deficit they handed to Obama, as well as the Wall Street crisis and bank bailouts.
It’s that simple: With no Bush income tax cuts, no unfunded Medicare drug benefit, and no off-budget Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. balance sheet would have been in fine shape for his successor. Then government investment needed to rescue the economy from the doldrums wouldn’t have seemed so alarming."
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“Not for nothing did Obama invoke President Dwight Eisenhower the other day. He’s basically governed as a moderate Republican all along — definitely not the kind of change his starry-eyed followers once believed in, but probably the best they can hope for come 2012.”
* Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More: Gene Lyons