By: Shawn Mitchell From: Townhall Finance
The Left and their Old Media amplifiers tell a simple story:
George Bush inherited from Bill Clinton a strong economy and a balanced budget. He proceeded to commit national arson by deregulating Wall Street, cutting taxes for the rich, and fighting two needless wars.
The long fuse of Bush’s fiscal folly finally struck dynamite in late 2008, blowing Clinton’s Camelot economy to bits. President Obama has struggled boldly—against Republican obstruction-- to fix problems so bad not even a modest genius like Bill Clinton could have fixed them in a single term. Clinton modestly admitted this in his convention keynote. So, steady on the transformational path. It’s the only way Forward to redistribution paradise and state allocated happiness.
It’s a measure of the current mood that this narrative has yet to get much pushback from battered conservatives. They’re suffering post traumatic stress from the election, and pre-traumatic stress, bracing for the preordained blame if America dives off the cliff a gleeful president seems to be gunning for.
It’s a shame, because the tidy Bush tale is mostly false and grossly incomplete. It’s little more than a team shout for Democrats, media cheerleaders, and partisan supporters. For that purpose, it’s quite effective, smearing conservative economic positions and providing perpetual cover for the cascading failure of Obama’s liberal policies: The worse things are, the more it will prove how badly Bush screwed things up. Forever, says Madeline Albright.
The fog of national amnesia and unreason hides a lot, and denies the complexity that obviously exists. A nation’s—and president’s--economic success depends on many variables, including business climate, currency and credit strength, a reasonable fiscal balance of taxing and spending, and more. The president doesn’t exclusively control any of the variables. He jockeys for influence among other factors, including Congress, the Fed, the business cycle, and unpredictable world events.
Viewing the big picture, Clinton was very lucky; Bush was very unlucky; and Obama is making it worse....