Brain Fertilizer

On this post over at Q and O Blog, I left the following comment. It might make more sense reading it in context of the post (a fiscal conservative's dissatisfaction with President Bush), but it does stand alone fairly well as a defense of Bush by itself:

I think that most criticisms of Bush's spending policy fail to take into account the context.
1) Bush lost the popular vote and needed the SCOTUS to put a quick end to Dem nonsense...but that strengthened the perception that he didn't win. That left him without any sort of "Mandate of the People" argument to push his agenda. Democrats could and did willfully obstruct the things he wanted to do.
2) Politicians need political capital to get things done. As mentioned above, sometimes that can come from a Mandate of the People (i.e., a landslide), sometimes from your party having control of Congress, but often it comes from making deals. If you need Democrat help to get something passed through the Senate, you have to give something to Senate Democrats. Bush got something for his agenda for every big-spending item he handed to the Democrats. For instance, we really needed to get the tax cuts passed in the recession he inherited, and we really needed the tax cuts accelerated after 9/11 to prevent a depression. The Democrats said they would oppose it, and I really think it took $15 billion for AIDS prevention in Africa, funding the No Child Left Behind Act, and a drug prescription plan for seniors to get enough votes to get the tax cuts accelerated. Why are you so quick to swallow the Old Media line that "(Republican) Presidents don't affect the economy" when this one obviously made a huge difference?
3) Allowing govt growth while simultaneously cutting taxes has resulted in the projection of a deficit, yes. The revenue growth because of the tax cuts has ameliorated that somewhat...but what it does do is set Bush up to make sweeping cuts in his next administration. He'll have a strong Mandate, he'll probably have a Republican-controlled (if not dominated) congress to help him out with it, and he'll have all sorts of quotes from Democrat leaders that "The deficit is a bad thing" to shore up support to make cuts to reduce the deficit.
Now, if that doesn't come to pass, Bush will go down in history as a bad President. But I think there is good reason to believe President Bush's second term of office will be much more conservative than the first. And if by chance he loses...leaving a significantly large deficit prevents Democrats from going hog wild on spending, and maybe even force THEM into spending cuts, since they'd face a hostile Republican congress.
Patience, folks. Help is on the way, just not from the direction Kerry asserts.

In those same comments, Shark said:

...I agree with one thing though- the Reps. are gonna have 1 hell of an intraparty fight after this election.

There will be a fight in the Republican tent very soon, just after the Democrats implode. The thing I like about it is that with the rise of the internet, there will be much more debate going from the grassroots upward, rather than direction and "take it or leave it" coming from the top down. It can't help but improve our two-party system immensely.

If you are coming from Winds of Change, you might also want to check out this related post.