REWRITE MY LIPS

When the Sun Never Sets: The nefarious effects of Bush's latest tax cut will continue on, and on, and on (Jack Beatty, June 6, 2003, Atlantic Unbound)

The $350 billion tax cut President Bush signed last week is a three-dimensional victory, yet another manifestation of the Rove-Bush strategy: win now, win later, and win even by policies that fail in their own terms. Unlike his father, who chose to ride out his recession by not acting to stimulate the economy, and who was seen as out of touch as a result, George W. has won big now by showing that he is not just a foreign-policy President. True, there is not much stimulus in the tax cut, but there is enough for Bush to take credit if the recovery predicted for later this year and 2004 actually occurs. Democrats taking solace from the fact that the particulars of the tax cut are unpopular betray the short-range tactical outlook that disables their party against the future-focused GOP. The improved economy will be universally popular, and then so will the tax cuts that supposedly brought it on.

One of the surest indicators of the crisis on the Left is the increasing necessity of its adherents to change facts in order to make their arguments. So here we get Mr. Beatty saying that George H. W. Bush's problem was that he took no action on the economy when, in fact, he lost his re-election bid because he alienated conservatives (who had both a Ross Perot option and a putatively conservative Democrat to vote for) when he raised taxes despite a solemn vow never to do so. The cost of that error is nearly incalculable, given that it revived (however briefly) a Democratic Party that was already in the process of marginilizing itself and that he could have just waited for the Cold War peace dividend to kick in. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2003 12:33 PM