I read stories like this one, quoted below, and I cannot help but feel that there is a perfect storm headed the way of the GOP boosters:
- current history of 'cut-tax and spend' profligacy,
- a tax-free military deployment, and
- looming fiscal challenge on which Americans are unlikely to compromise.
All that against the growing awareness of the warm waters dangers of income and wealth inequality.
The DP has better strategists than my armchair version, but I cannot help but think that introducing a demand that "Bush must pay for his policies and leave a clean-slate for the next President" might be something to consider as round-two (post-veto) of the tussle on the "emergency supplemental" appropriations bill heats up. It's not clear where fiscal responsibility versus no-new-taxes stands up in the electorates' mind right now, as a net plus or minus for Democrats; but forcing the GOP to come to terms with revenue shortfalls seems to me to have political merit.
If you want to get mercilessly Pigovian, then you might suggest that those who should pay for the past eight years ought to be Bush's gilded base, as he described them, "the haves and the have mores", in a one-time tax assessment, a true-up for the miscalculations of their undivided tenure in office. (I'm even more comfortable with "eight years", because even Charlie Rose has somewhat abruptly started a series, "Memo to the Next President", while the sitting President still has over 660 days in office!).
Bush's acknowledgment that inequality is widening and the renewed focus on health care and revamping aid to dislocated workers suggest the administration appreciates the issue's political potency.
"Voters' perceptions of economic health are very different than they used to be," said Mark McKinnon, Bush's former media adviser and now an adviser to Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican seeking to succeed Bush. "The old indicators that we reliably counted on — unemployment, the stock market — don't seem to matter much anymore. And other things do — health care and pensions."
Adds former Treasury Secretary John Snow, now chairman of private-equity buyout firm Cerberus Capital Management: "The Democrats sense they have an issue here and are going to try to push it, and the Republicans are going to have to have an answer."
