It’s rather unusual for the president, especially this president, to write an op-ed for publication, but sure enough, that’s George W. Bush’s byline in today’s Wall Street Journal. (Whether the president literally wrote the piece is open to some debate.) It’s the fourth op-ed from Bush since he became president in 2001.
It’s filled with perfectly pleasant platitudes about dismissing “politics as usual,” decrying the “partisan environment of today’s Washington,” optimism for finding “common ground,” and advancing the “American Dream.” He neglected to mention moms and apple pie, though I’m sure it was just an editing omission. Bush also omitted any references to how he created the “partisan environment” and rejected “common ground” for six years. It must have slipped his mind.
In what I suspect is a preview of State of the Union agenda items, the president also laid out his vision for the immediate future. Instead of quoting the whole thing, I’ll just reference Ezra’s summary of the op-ed.
Lucky for [the new Congress], he’s got a common sense, broadly agreeable agenda in the offing: Escalation in Iraq, continuing his tax cuts, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, passing a line-item veto, and ending earmarks. Truly, the man’s talent for consensus is boundless.
Quite right. Bush has learned nothing. The election “thumping,” as he called it, might have been perceived as a wake-up call by most presidents in his position, but not Bush. Everything he wanted from a Republican Congress he still wants from a Democratic Congress. The agenda items he expected the GOP to embrace, he now expects Dems to accept with open arms. It’s 2001 all over again — pretend to have a mandate and maybe everything will work out fine.
This is particularly true on economic policy.
Because revenues have grown and we’ve done a better job of holding the line on domestic spending, we met our goal of cutting the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule. By continuing these policies, we can balance the federal budget by 2012 while funding our priorities and making the tax cuts permanent. In early February, I will submit a budget that does exactly that. The bottom line is tax relief and spending restraint are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget. Now is not the time to raise taxes on the American people.
First, Bush didn’t cut the deficit in half. I may not have been a math major, and I may not have access to Karl Rove’s special brand of arithmetic, but I know that when the annual budget goes from $400 billion to $250 billion, that isn’t a 50% drop.
Second, Bush started with the biggest surpluses in American history. To brag about a quarter-trillion dollar deficit is amusing, in a sad kind of way.
But it’s the “continuing these policies” line that’s the most interesting. To read Bush’s op-ed, it’s possible to continue to cut taxes, continue to fight two wars, “fund our national priorities,” and eliminate the deficit entirely over the next five years, despite budget forecasts that show the deficit soaring over the same period.
I share Matthew Yglesias’ skepticism.
I’m dying to know where the cuts are going to be in this budget. Not, presumably, in defense, Social Security, Medicare, homeland security, or Medicaid. But to balance the budget while keeping the Bush tax cuts permanent without cutting those programs would require really, really steep cuts elsewhere. Certainly I wouldn’t advise working together in a bipartisan manner with the White House on this. Either there are going to be some really egregious accounting gimmicks, or else there are going to be some proposed cuts that should be wielded as a mighty political bludgeon against those Republicans who, unlikely Bush, need to run for re-election.
If this is any indication of how the president intends to govern in 2007, he’s likely to run out of ink in his rarely-used veto pen, because Dems didn’t take back Congress to play games and follow in Tom DeLay’s footsteps.