Liberal Admits President Bush Passed Democrat Policy

Ya think? Back in the day, I wrote that Bush’s domestic policies were a Democrat dream, but they hated him so much they couldn’t acknowledge it. Ezra Klein lists the progressive Bush agenda:

Bush’s domestic agenda was a capitulation to liberalism, not that Democrats were spineless wimps. NCLB and the Medicare prescription drug bill were both longtime Democratic ideas. The problem with NCLB was implementation, and while the problem with Medicare Part D was that its design was a giveaway to drug companies, it was also hundreds and hundreds of billions funneled towards the largest expansions of Medicare since the program’s creation. Health-care reform, in particular, would likely be impossible if the prescription drug benefit hadn’t been accomplished. There’d be no way to add that money to the bottom line of the bill and pay for everything. Democrats owe Bush a debt of gratitude for tossing that onto the deficit.

Sarbanes-Oxley and McCain-Feingold were, again, bills doing basically progressive things. As I understand it, Bush didn’t actually support either bill, but he decided against actually vetoing them. On some level, they represented the administration submitting to Congress and pubic opinion.

And conservatives were frustrated as hell that Bush couldn’t find his veto pen. And they also felt betrayed by a Republican Congress whose job it was to shrink, not grow, government.

But here’s the deal: All lawmakers get to D.C. and want to be relevant. It’s like a Surgeon deciding everything is non-surgical. Legislators make laws. It’s what they do. And so, even conservative lawmakers feel the pull to do something. In Congress, doing something means writing laws. Writing laws means creating more regulation (most of the time) not less and becoming more invasive in Americans’ lives.

So, it’s no surprise that the Republicans and President Bush were progressive while in office and it’s what earned them hate ratings from the American people. And the reason the Democrats are doing worse is because the American people thought the Democrats would turn away from that. Yeah, I know, crazy. But that’s what they thought.

President Obama is getting lower and lower marks because he’s not showing restraint or dialing back the arm of government interference. No, he’s ratcheting up and scaring the hell out of the American people.

Ezra says this:

But on the whole, Bush’s domestic record is more a tale of co-opting liberal ideas and adding money for corporations than it is a tale of achieving longtime conservative ends.

By contrast, Barack Obama really is pursuing longtime progressive agenda items. There’s no analogue to welfare reform on his docket. The administration’s grim determination to leverage their uncommonly large majority to achieve things like health-care reform and cap-and-trade is, I think, somewhat underappreciated. The fact that they’re not dogmatically liberal in the details can distract from the aggressive liberalism of their vision.

Oh yes. It’s aggressive and liberal. And maybe the press doesn’t see it, because Obama is a statist dream come true, but the American people see and fear. And unlike President Bush, President Obama is willing to go 100% against the American people and push through unpopular and overreaching legislation.

We’ll see how that works out for him. He has the press praising even his failures, so that will be the biggest difference between Bush and Obama. It won’t be their domestic agendas, that’s for sure.

Posted in Barack Obama • Liberals • Republicans