The Bush Spending Myth

Of course I can’t prove that conservatives are wrong to think that George W. Bush became such a huge failure because Americans disapproved of him spending so much money. But it seems like a very dubious theory. Jon Chait explains:

But to these critics Bush’s primary ideological apostasy is that he supposedly presided over vast new spending increases. Both Democrats and Republicans have gleefully taken up the charge–the former in order to discredit Bush, the latter to shield conservatism from the stench of his failure. It’s a trumped-up indictment. Bush did spend generously on defense and homeland security, with conservative approval, but domestic discretionary spending actually declined from 3.1 percent of GDP to 2.8 percent. It is true that Bush approved a vast new prescription drug benefit. But 89 percent of Americans believed in 2000 that Medicare should have such a benefit. Bush’s critics on the right have no explanation for how he could have gotten elected in 2000 without promising one or reelected in 2004 without following through. Still, the critique has taken hold. The Democracy Corps poll found that, by a 17-point margin, Republicans attribute their party’s failures in 2006 and 2008 to its insufficient conservatism. (Voters as a whole attributed it to excessive conservatism.)

Of course arguably it makes sense to respond to defeat by doubling down anyway. The Democratic Party has moved left since its defeats in 2002 and 2004, and done much better in 2006 and 2008. I think some aspects of that leftward shift have been politically helpful, but others have probably been politically damaging, and all things considered I think it would be odd to argue that the party got more successful because its leader started espousing a more progressive platform. But they won anyway. And it’s a good thing that party leaders now embrace strategic redeployment from Iraq and serious action on the climate crisis not so much because embracing those ideas was or is key to electoral victory, but because those are sound views on key issues and espousing them is consistent with winning elections so politicians should be pressed to do so.