The Democrats' Debt Dilemma
Published on
October 22, 2009
By Gary Andres | The Weekly Standard
Democrats face a growing political crisis with federal spending and debt, a self-inflicted quandary they created in some obvious and non-obvious ways.
Enacting a massive stimulus bill that failed to produce economic growth and tax revenue contributed to this predicament. Not a lot of bang for the bucks.
But President Obama and his allies in Congress now face another, less foreseen dilemma. Ironically, it was Obama and his party that stoked these fiscal concerns over the last eight years. As a result, worries about spending and debt are now a bipartisan pastime. It wasn't always that way.
Twenty years ago Democrats in Washington rarely fretted about budgetary largess. True, some liberals railed against too much defense spending. But Republicans routinely expressed more worries about spending, debt and deficits. "To the extent that the level of federal debt was an issue in politics, Republicans, not Democrats, talked about it," Tony Blankley, who worked in the Reagan Administration and for Speaker Newt Gingrich, told me.
George W. Bush and his political opponents in Washington changed all that. During the eight years of his presidency, Democrats discovered a new issue: bludgeoning Republicans for "fiscal irresponsibility." A new line of attack was born. A Medicare bill that wasn't paid for, tax cuts that added to the deficit, and massive spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, were all examples of Republican fiscal profligacy. Democrats reminded Americans about this fiscal recklessness every day. Attacking federal spending and raising concerns about debt became part of the anti-Bush arsenal.