Karl Rove Has No Shame

The fault line in American politics is not really between Republicans and Democrats, but rather between taxpayers and the Washington political elite. Here is a perfect example that symbolizes why economic policy is such a mess. President Bush’s former top aide, Karl Rove, makes the case in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama Administration has been fiscally irresponsible. That’s certainly true, but as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions (here and here), Rove has zero credibility on these issues. In the excerpt below, Rove attacks Obama for earmarks, but this corrupt form of pork-barrel spending skyrocketed during the Bush years. He attacks Obama for government-run healthcare, but Rove helped push through Congress a reckless new entitlement for prescription drugs. He attacks Obama for misusing TARP, but the Bush Administration created that no-strings-attached bailout program. These are examples of hypocrisy, but Rove also is willing to prevaricate. He blames Obama for boosting the burden of government spending to 24 percent of GDP, but it was the Bush Administration that boosted the federal government from 18.2 percent of GDP in 2001 to 24.7 percent of GDP in 2009. Obama is guilty of following similar policies and maintaining a bloated budget, but it was Bush (with Rove’s guidance) that drove the economy into a fiscal ditch.

The president’s problem is largely a mess of his own making. Deficit spending did not begin when Mr. Obama took office. But he and his Democratic allies have supported, proposed, passed or signed and then spent every dime that’s gone out the door since Jan. 20, 2009. Voters know it is Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders who approved a $410 billion supplemental (complete with 8,500 earmarks) in the middle of the last fiscal year, and then passed a record-spending budget for this one. Mr. Obama and Democrats approved an $862 billion stimulus and a $1 trillion health-care overhaul, and they now are trying to add $266 billion in “temporary” stimulus spending to permanently raise the budget baseline. It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year. This is indeed the road to fiscal hell, and it’s been paved by the president and his party. 

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A Well-Deserved Attack on Rove and Bush for Bloating Government

I’ve been on a lonely crusade to expose big-government Republicans for being just as bad as Democrats (or even worse, since they should know better), so I’m glad to see Don Devine and David Keene in the Washington Post making similar points. Every conservative who despises big-government RINOs such as Arlen Specter (who at least had the decency to become a Democrat) should feel the same about Bush and Rove.

From William F. Buckley Jr. to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, the creators of the modern conservative movement always taught that excessive concentration of power in government leads inevitably to corruption and the diminution of personal freedoms. But while Rove credits these leaders for shaping his early political views — “at the age of thirteen, I was wild for Barry Goldwater,” he writes — he did not pursue their values while in the White House. To the contrary, as the chief political architect of the Bush presidency, Rove was instrumental in directing an administration most notable for its enormous expansion of national government. …In total, Bush increased federal spending on domestic programs more than any president since Richard Nixon, easily surpassing Bill Clinton, Carter and his own father, so much so that by 2008, America had two big-government parties. Rove writes that as a teenager he carried around a paperback copy of Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative,” but he should have heeded the book’s first few pages, in which Goldwater warned against hyphenated conservatism. The Bush administration’s move toward big government was not gradual, either; it was signaled during then-Gov. Bush’s campaign. In 1999, the journalist Tucker Carlson interviewed Bush in Austin and asked him if he was a small-government conservative. Mr. Bush replied no; he said he was an “efficient-government conservative.” Bush’s campaign rarely called for spending cuts of any kind and even opposed eliminating the Department of Energy, whose abolition had been in every GOP platform since 1980. …Rove reveals his true heroes in his memoir, when we learn that he decorated his White House office with memorabilia of progressive Teddy Roosevelt and pragmatist William McKinley. …The astonishing concentration of power in Washington today has created a huge opportunity for conservatives and the GOP. With President Obama’s policies of big government, big bailouts, big banks and big bureaucracy, the Democratic Party has jettisoned the working men and women of America, who are increasingly coming to reject being ruled by one corrupt city along the Potomac. They want to be governed by themselves in their communities, their localities and their states, in a 21st-century version of the founders’ federalism. But thanks in part to their recent big-government legacy, Republicans have been slow to seize this opportunity. In his concluding passages, Rove concedes that Bush “went deep into Democratic territory to show how government can use the tools of capitalism to soften its rough justice” — an admission that neglects state, local and individual alternatives to creating a just society, and that confirms our worst fears about hyphenated conservatism. Recently, President Obama visited a bookstore in Iowa and joked that he was there to purchase Rove’s memoir. Conservatives can only hope it was not to get any more ideas on how to expand government.

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Pinocchio Rove Strikes Again

George Bush ranks as one of America’s most fiscally irresponsible presidents. He increased overall spending from $1.8 trillion to $3.5 trillion and most of that new spending was used to create or expand domestic programs (no-bureaucrat-left-behind education spending, pork-filled highway bills, sleazy Wall Street bailouts, corrupt farm spending, new Medicare entitlements, etc) that are not legitimate functions of the federal government. So it is galling to see his former senior adviser writing columns complaining about Barack Obama being a big spender. Many of the criticisms about the Obama Administration in his latest WSJ column are correct, to be sure, but Karl Rove has zero moral authority to make those arguments. Moreover, Rove once again engages in sloppy or dishonest (you choose) analysis by blaming Obama for some of Bush’s mistakes. In the excerpt below, he blames Obama for any of the Fiscal Year 2009 debt that was incurred after January 20 of last year. But as I’ve already explained, 96 percent of the spending in FY2009 is the result of Bush’s policies:

Consider that from Jan. 20, 2001, to Jan. 20, 2009, the debt held by the public grew $3 trillion under Mr. Bush—to $6.3 trillion from $3.3 trillion at a time when the national economy grew as well. By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years. …Mr. Bush’s deficits ran an average of 3.2% of GDP, slightly above the post World War II average of 2.7%. Mr. Obama’s plan calls for deficits that will average 4.2% over the next decade. Team Obama has been on history’s biggest spending spree, which has included a $787 billion stimulus, a $30 billion expansion of a child health-care program, and a $410 billion federal spending bill that increased nondefense discretionary spending 10% for the last half of fiscal year 2009. Mr. Obama also hiked nondefense discretionary spending another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

Correction: In an earlier post on one of Rove’s columns, I incorrectly claimed that Bush never vetoed a bill because it spent too much.That was wrong. He did veto a handful of bills once Democrats took control of Congress.

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