• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Rather than offering up an illuminating case of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average, the Bush campaign was casting a political freak show in order to present a tiny minority as the norm.

The Bush campaign, however, would have had no problem finding families of four making between $350,000 and $700,000 who got a bigger tax cut under Bush’s plan than under Gore’s. In that income range, they all did.

______

There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s dedicated to fiscal discipline.

—Ari Fleischer, of President George W. Bush,

October 18, 2002

The rationale for Bush’s tax cuts was that, with a $4.6 trillion projected surplus, “I think it’s fair, I think it’s right that one quarter of the surplus go back to the people who pay the bills.” (Not to quibble, but his tax cut was more than a third of the surplus. He was $450 billion off, enough to pay for all nonmilitary discretionary spending for a year.)

So, when we were expecting huge surpluses, Bush argued that it was our money, and if the government was taking more than it needed, we deserved to get some of it back. Specifically, we needed a $1.6 trillion tax cut, heavily tilted toward the wealthy.

But once evidence began to emerge that the economy was sputtering and the surplus was shrinking, this rationale no longer applied. There were new economic problems that needed new solutions. How could the economy be jump-started? Bush met with his top economic advisors and came back with an innovative answer: a $1.6 trillion tax cut, heavily tilted toward the wealthy.

It soon became apparent that we were headed back to deficit country. How would America’s new fiscal discipline sheriff explain to the nation that he’d have to break his campaign promise never to go into deficit? The answer came on September 11, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, creating a national emergency and necessitating a war.

Not only did the tragedy provide a justification for deficit spending, it gave Bush a reliable laugh line for his speeches. Here’s the joke. This is from a June 7, 2002, speech in Iowa. But he’s told it on at least thirteen different occasions.

I remember campaigning in Chicago and one of the reporters said, “Would you ever deficit spend?” I said, “Only—only—in times of war, in times of economic insecurity as a result of a recession, or in times of national emergency.” Never did I dream we’d have a trifecta.

It got a laugh in Iowa. And a laugh in Georgia when he campaigned for Saxby Chambliss. It killed in Texas when he campaigned for gubernatorial candidate Rick Perry. They loved it at the Simon for Governor luncheon in Santa Clara. And he got laughter and applause at a meeting of the leaders of the Fiscal Responsibility Coalition in our nation’s capital.

To me the joke itself is not as funny as the fact that it’s based on a lie. He never said he’d allow a deficit “only in times of war, in times of economic security as a result of a recession, or in times of national emergency.” He’d never said anything remotely like it during the campaign. On June 9, 2002, Tim Russert interviewed Budget Director Mitch Daniels on Meet the Press.

RUSSERT: Now, we have checked everywhere and we’ve even called the White House as to when the President said that when he was campaigning in Chicago, and it didn’t happen. The closest he came was when he was asked, “Would you give up part of your tax cut in order to ensure a balanced budget?” And he said, “No.” But no one ever talked about a war, a recession, and an emergency, the trifecta.

Daniels responded that he was not “the White House librarian,” so he didn’t have a record of Bush saying this during the campaign. A few weeks later, Russert told me that he’d heard that Ari Fleischer was hopping mad the following Monday morning and wanted to “go after Russert” for questioning Bush’s credibility. Apparently, Karl Rove then took Fleischer aside and explained that they might want to let this one slide.2

Even after Russert exposed the lie, Bush continued to tell it.

So now we have record deficits. But the good news is that,