In reviewing the strategy employed by President Bush it is clear that he has seized upon a tactic which has apparently worked well for him. That tactic is very simple, when the rationale you have used is shown to be untrue, you quickly shift to a new rationale.
Let's review a couple of Mr. Bush’s decisions to enumerate this tactic. First was the Iraq war. The first reason was that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction threatened the United States. We had things like a mushroom cloud, yellowcake, centrifuge tubes, mobile weapons labs and specific amounts of different types of biological and chemical weapons. When it became clear none of these were true, it was enforcing UN resolutions. Then it was Saddam was an evil dictator and we needed to free the Iraqi people. Today it is that we need to establish democracy in that part of the world so that it will spread throughout the region.
The next issue is the Bush tax cuts. The first rationale was that the American public was being overtaxed because Mr. Bush claimed we had a $5.7 trillion projected surplus. When it became clear there was no surplus, the rationale was to stimulate the economy. The problem with this rationale is that the majority of the deficit has been created by his tax cuts as documented by the Congressional Budget Office which last year estimated 270 billion of the $420 billion deficit was because of the Bush tax cuts. The new rationale being used to make the tax cuts permanent is that we need consistency so investors can plan properly. This is in spite of the fact that Brookings institute and others have estimated that making the tax cuts permanent will further drain the treasury and add another 2.4 trillion to the deficit by 2014.
The president and his political advisers have updated the quote from PT Barnum that “a sucker is born every minute” to a sucker is born every second. This can be the only explanation for the election results of 2004. I thought it was especially revealing that in this morning's business section the CEO of Hewlett-Packard was removed for failing to achieve the corporate objectives. The rationale used by many who voted for George W. Bush is that he screwed things up in his first term and needs to be reelected so that he can fix them.
And the Republicans called President Clinton, "slick willy"!